ECG prepaid crisis: Government must make ECG a joint venture – Analyst

Head of Research at the Chamber of Petroleum Consumers (COPEC), Benjamin Nsiah, has urged the government to make the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) a joint venture enterprise.

According to him, the current ECG prepaid metering system crisis could be attributed to the clash of interests at the utility service provider.

Interviewed on e.tv Ghana’s Fact Sheet, Benjamin Nsiah reiterated that merging the state-owned company with a private firm would balance the clash of interest and in the long run prevent such metering crisis.

“I think there’s a lot of impunities at ECG and I think government need to reconsider privatizing ECG. They are in this quagmire because of certain political and professional interest operating at the firm and we do so because the state owns almost 100% of this organization. It’s not a joint venture. So when we begin to privatize it, there will not be that conflict between political interest and private interest,” he told Sefah Danquah.

“I’ve heard a lot about it, people arguing that the professionals at ECG wanted to sabotage their MD because he was insisting that there be a transparency audit in the metering system. I mentioned earlier that there’s lot of impunities not only from the metering system and the vending challenges we are facing now because if you also take the auditor general’s report 2019-2020 you’ll weep for the State looking at how finances are bring misappropriated, contracts are being sole sourced and people continue to wreck the system. Now when you add that into this particular vending challenge we are facing it means that the state is not capable of managing the affairs of ECG,” he added.

Mr. Nsiah furthered that professionalism and quality service need to be prioritized by the various public utility service providers.

“For us to overcome this metering challenges that has to do with professionals at this particular State own entity and political internet which is the MD because they are appointed the party in government. Now for us to balance it we need a third party and that has to be a private equity interest in ECG which is the joint venture I think we need as a country to critical look at it to overcome certain misappropriations and irregularities and also these vending challenges,” he shared.