Member of Parliament of the Bongo constituency and member of the Mines and Energy Committee of Parliament, Edward Abambire Bawa, has observed that the Managing Director (MD) of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Dubik Mahama, should not be in office for peddling falsehood to Ghanaians.
He said that the ECG lied in its March 11 statement, indicating that the erratic power supply (dumsor) being experienced in certain parts of the country was a result of 630 faulty transformers within its operational areas.
Mr. Bawa maintained that the MD for the ECG, having approved the statement, which was at variance with the findings from the regulator, the Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC), should continue to be in office.
“That man should not be in the office today,” he said on The Key Points on Saturday.
“It has been established that ECG looked into the eyes of Ghanaians and lied through a press statement. ECG issued a statement saying that the reason for the outages in the country between 7 p.m. and 11 p.m. was as a result of the fact that they were replacing 630 of their transformers,” he stated.
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He explained that on the back of the ECG’s statement, the PURC requested the GPS locations and the ratings of the transformers, stressing that the PURC, based on the ratings would determine whether those transformers were overloaded.
“From their [PURC] findings, only 89 went beyond 100. If you put it, about 626 of the transformers were between 70 and 100; some were even less than 70. ECG lied to the public under the signature of their Managing Director.
In his opinion, the action of the ECG MD alone “gives a reason why the man should not be in the office today.”
The Bongo lawmaker further argued that PURC’s findings vindicated the minority’s position that ECG has since August 2023 failed to comply with the Cash Waterfall Mechanism.
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“It is important to put it on record that all the things we were saying have been proven right. We had indicated that from August [2023] up until February [2024], all the revenues that ECG collected were never put into the cash waterfall mechanism.
Furthermore, Mr. Bawa revealed that according to ECG’s documents submitted to PURC, the power distributor is running 61 bank accounts instead of a single account, as advised by the IMF and a subsequent order from President Akufo-Addo.
“IMF had indicated that you have a single account such that anytime you take the revenues, we can follow the account where the moneys are put in, the President subsequently gives an order that run a single account.
Expect more outages during peak hours – ECG warns
“When PwC [Price Waterhouse Coopers] was contracted to audit the cash waterfall mechanism and the activities of the ECG, they refused to make their bank accounts available to the auditor. At that time, we [the NDC] thought that they were running around 37 accounts. Per the documents that have been presented by ECG itself to PURC, they are running 61 accounts,” he told Alfred Ocansey on The Key Points.