Ghanaians won't forgive me if SOFTtribe goes scot-free - GWCL MD

Managing Director of Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL), Dr. Clifford Braimah has stated categorically that he would employ every legal means available to bring Ghanaian-owned software developer, SOFTtribe to book for what he termed as contractual breaches in their partnership.

According to him, Ghanaians wouldn’t take it lightly on him should this case die off; adding that it will effortlessly secure its clients' data and continue to serve them potable water.

In addressing the rising tension between GWCL and SOFTtribe on Thursday in Accra, Dr. Braimah explained, “as a utility company, we also wanted to focus on our core business producing potable water to the people of Ghana and letting other Ghanaian businesses handle our core businesses and grow. We then decided to hand over our commercial business documents, functional specifications, existing database structure, and the full customer database to SOFTtribe to study with the guidance of our staff.”

He explained that GWCL was served with notice of cyber terrorism attacks in their source code after complaints were lodged to SOFTribe due to some consistent technical challenges.

Despite these technical hitches, the general manager for GWCL indicated that due to their 3 years working relationship of SOFTRIBE, the company was still paid over GHC1 million every month, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they would fix the problem.

According to Dr Clifford, 252 machines costing GHC787,000 were procured to help fix the problems but the situation remained unfixed, hence, the machines became 'useless'.

“Their CEO wrote to inform us that they will fix the problem within a maximum of 3 months. Since October 2018, they have not been able to fix the problem. They shifted the goalpost and informed us that all the issues would be fixed if GWCL were to purchase Point of Sales (p.o.s) devices to allow all our cashiers across the country to be hooked on the system. We spent over 700,000 ghana cedis to procure POS devices….as we speak, they have not been able to develop a solution for the POS and none is in use,” Dr Clifford stated.

The inability of Softribe to fix their alleged technical challenges consistently left GWCL nothing but to hand over a letter to them after giving them two months grace period (from March to May) to justify why their contracts shouldn't be terminated though the initial three-year-contract was extended to six months.

Upon realising there was a dip in revenue from GHC64 million a month to GHC60 million due to the foregoing problems, GWCL then abrogated the contract after an independent IT firm hired by GWCL to audit the services of SOFTtribe noted that the former was using a porous old systems for e-billing customers of GWCL.

He, therefore, called on Ghanaians to keep calm as the situation is under control, and SOFTtribe to seek redress in court and stop using other illegal means for their 'lies' to be heard.