Traders at the Kejetia Market Complex have stated that they will use every means possible, within the law, to ensure that each store is given a separate meter.
Currently, about seven thousand stores within the market are put on one bulk meter which the traders have complained about for about two years now.
Efforts to get the management of Kejetia Market and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) to allocate a separate meter to each store have yielded no results.
This has caused the traders to stop paying electricity bills since May 2021, thereby accruing to a total debt of five million and four hundred thousand cedi (GHS 5,400,000). The non-payment of the bills has led to the disconnection of electricity to the market for six days now.
President of the Federation of Kumasi Traders, Akwasi Prempeh told Alfred Ocansey on 3FM Sunrise, Monday 27 June, 2022 that they are ready to pay the debt the owe ECG and have agreed with ECG to pay 20% of their debt today but they insist that individual separate meters should be assigned to the stores.
“If we don’t get individual separate meters within the market, we are going to use a different approach to fight for that. ECG has told us that the more people you have on a bulk meter, the more power we consume and the high rate the ECG also bill us” he emphasized
The traders are pleading with the government to help resolve the issue, and also assure that they are ready to bear the cost of installing the meters since the current system which allows the market management to use their discretion to share the bill among the traders is problematic.
“It doesn’t allow the traders the opportunity to monitor their electricity consumption or even regulate it” Prempeh added.
By Samuel Afriyie Owusu|3news.com|Ghana