The Managing Director of the Electricity Company Ghana (ECG) has justified the decision of his outfit to cut the power supply from communities in the Yilo and Manya Krobo municipalities in the Eastern Region since July 27, 2022.
According to Samuel Dubik Mahama, even though he is aware of the consequences of cutting power supply on households and businesses, the right thing must be done.
He said that the ECG was left with no option but to cut the power supply to these communities because all efforts to get them to pay for the electricity they use have proven futile and have even resulted in some of his officers being attacked.
“Do not for a second think that I am happy about what is going on. There are certain points in time, to be a leader you have to stand up and be counted. If I wanted to please Ghanaians, I would be selling ‘Waakye’ or giving people ice cream. I have to make certain tough decisions. Since 2014, those people have not been paying their bills.
“There is a town that doesn’t want prepaid meters and because of that, they are cutting my fiber optics cables, they are disturbing my transmission lines. I disconnect them from the distribution transformer, we go to our base, come back and the town has connected themselves to the network.
“I don’t know (how they reconnect to the network). It didn’t stop there, this thing happened twice and I decided that we disconnect the distribution transformer from the high tension. We disconnect from the high tension. Upon one of those evenings that we were done with our patrols. We were driving through the area; we get there and we see that the thing has been connected back to the high tension. The soldiers and my technicians get out to check, a mob comes out. The mob starts pelting stones and hitting them, if the soldiers were not there to protect my men what will have happened to them?
“… electricity (supply) is a grid if somebody is tempering with it you cannot give the other person stable power and if we don’t have access to the grid how can we work? So, we then decided to shut down that line because they kept on tripping the line that was leading to Somanya. So, we then decided to shut down the whole feeder because we need to shut it down, come and sit down and let’s have a conversation as the way we are going to move forward,” he explained.
