Over the past few months there have been complaints by post-paid customers of the Electricity Company of Ghana, about exorbitant fees being charged, as well as delays in provision of bills.
A visit to one of Accra’s commercial hubs, the Makola market showed a number of traders experiencing a similar ordeal. In an interview with TV3, a trader explained that he had been experiencing irregularities in his electricity charges.
“Now for the bill, when you go, you’ll even see it in three folds. Today you check it, and it wouldn’t be the same as the previous one. We had a bill of about GHC8,000 only to go 3 day’s time and it has been changed to about 12,000.”
The Electricity Company of Ghana has therefore launched another operation dubbed ‘fix the bill, pay the bil’l and this time, the Company is targeting post-paid meter users who are experiencing irregularities in billing. This would be the Company’s third operation within the year 2023 alone.
The previous billing process proved to be time-consuming, expensive and unsustainable. While the Company’s post-paid customers grew exponentially, the number of meter readers shrunk in proportion.
The ECG is therefore changing the entire billing process by first, relying on the scarce resources to read meters in sets, at least once every 3 months. The Company will also leverage technology to bill customers.
In an interview with TV3, Manager of External Communications at ECG, Laila Abubakar said, “It has become very necessary because we are having continuous complaints from customers about the bills that we’ve been giving them.”
“And they’re right, we lost some of our data, so we’re sending all our staff out as meter readers for the next months that we can clean up the data and bill our customers correctly,” she explained.
During the month-long exercise which is set to end on or before 11th December, 2023, staff of ECG will be visiting the premises of customers with handheld devices that will capture meter readings with pictorial and geolocation evidences. The data will be immediately seen and verified in the backend, and billing will be based on that reading.
“We’re trying to conscientize our customers that we don’t have enough meter readers and the billing that the ECG has been running is quite unsustainable. What we’re trying to do is establish a certain pattern. If the customer is satisfied with that range of bill then they should expect to pay same amount every month until a meter reader comes. We’re giving ourselves every three months at least, to send meter readers around.”, Laila Abubakar said.
The ECG began the exercise at the Makola Market and will be visiting other centers within its operational areas. But the message now to customers is that they shouldn’t expect meter readers at their doorstep every month.