ECG must open up to new ideas for positive change - Kofi-Buah

Mr Emmanuel Armah Kofi-Buah, Minister of Energy and Petroleum, has underscored the need for the management of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to open up to new ideas and processes that would create positive changes to ensure efficiency and effectiveness in its operations.

He stressed the need for the management of ECG to make good use of every human resource at its disposal in order to make the company an enviable one with better customer service to its clients and the country as a whole.

This, the Energy Minister noted, calls for the introduction of mechanisms to deal with some staff of the ECG who allegedly connived with some people to cheat the Company in order to correct public perception on the allegation of corruption.

Mr Kofi-Buah made the call at ECG’s second national management retreat held in Takoradi to deliberate on challenges confronting the company and to find solutions to them.

The three-day retreat had as its theme, “Positive attitude: Key to ECG’s success”.

Mr Kofi-Buah impressed upon the management of the Company to ensure strict discipline and right attitude towards work at all levels, saying that “good work must be rewarded whilst lackadaisical attitude towards work must be seriously sanctioned”.

He warned that the huge investments injected into the Company to address some challenges would be in vain if strict adherence to discipline and avoidance of negative practices were not observed.

To avoid mistrust between the company and customers, Mr. Kofi-Buah entreated the management to intensify its public communication to ensure free flow of information to enable customers to become abreast with any challenges facing the Company to help the consumers plan effectively towards such power outages.

Mr. William Hurton-Mensah, Managing Director of ECG noted that, despite the huge investment injected to improve the operations of the company, customers were still not satisfied; “Therefore we are here to find out what we can do to change and correct that impression”.

According to him, the ECG “continues to witness the declining trend in system losses from a high rate of about 26.2 per cent in 2011 to about 19.8 per cent by the end of 2012”.

The Managing Director said the institution had observed improvement in revenue collection describing it as encouraging as “revenue collection in 2012 was about 92 per cent, but 104 per cent for private customers only”.

Mr. Hurton-Mensah said while project implementation was progressing, the Company had not yet reached its goal because customers continued to experience poor electricity services.

He noted that Ghanaians were still dissatisfied with the Company's role as an electricity distribution firm and therefore every strategy must be adopted to correct the perception.

To this end, the Managing Director entreated the management staff to come out with ideas and raise relevant issues that would help overcome the challenges they faced, adding that they were all capable of transforming their individual areas of operation.

“Success for ECG would be achieved through proper and strict supervision as well as the passion to drive, motivate and encourage employees to work assiduously to achieve our goals and objectives even in the midst of challenges and extraordinary circumstances”, he added.