ECG Dances in the Jaws of PURC to Spite Ghanaian Consumers

By Jean Lukaz MIH

Resolved: On Tuesday, 12th July, 2011, the ‘Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) Customer Disservice Series’ released a new episode. The story not being an original script, a wrong meter reading resulted in a bill of GH¢ 57,000 instead of GH¢ 2,700, resulting in a power disconnection at the premises of CIT SYS Co Ltd.

According to ECG, it was an enforcement policy to disconnect high debtors immediately, even if it is their fault for not delivering electricity bills for over four months, for making the wrong reading [which is no reading at all but an estimation by a lazy meter reader], and for short-changing a Ghanaian consumer.

Even with instruction from the PURC, it took altercations, bigotry, chauvinism, arrogance and a snapshot of the old image of poor customer relations to get PURC’s instruction taken heed to. The ECG power suppliers are Conservatives that really know how to wield their power!

The protagonist, the District Manager of the ECG Makola Division was playing Don Quixote, feeling larger than life, and boasting of his power to disobey instructions from the PURC and the ECG Director of Customer Service.

The melodrama was a scene that depicted the ECG disconnection team robots blaming the ECG Billing and Claims Department for the inefficiency of the latter and claiming that the only way to get ECG to act responsively is for wrongfully disconnected consumers to rather put pressure on ECG as they (the disconnection robots) have to do their disconnection work anyway.

After all the corrections are made and the PURC instruction was finally heeded to, who now pays for lost business income resulting from the ECG billing mistake and the wrongful disconnection and when? PURC?

The prophesy of the Consumer Partnership was true as it has come to pass that the PURC lacks the drive to enforce its publicity stunts intended to make the organisation look consumer-friendly. Making laws and regulations is one thing and enforcing them is another ball game all together. The process of enforcement must go beyond letters and phone calls to bringing to book men behaving badly at ECG.

Look Who’s Siphoning My Power!

By Jean Lukaz MIH

I may sound alarmist but certainly many Ghanaian electricity consumers have not taken note of the poor quality of electricity that we are all receiving- a situation that obviously leaves us short-changed. The truth is, poor quality electricity is slow in output and takes longer to power certain appliances whilst costing consumers more.

To quote Brian Hitchen of the Sunday Express, UK, ‘technically minded people will scoff and say it is a figment of my imagination. But I’m sure that my electric kettle is taking longer to boil and that my toaster isn’t popping up quite as fast as it used to do. The electric kettle element is not scaled with limestone deposit and there are no lose wires or crumbs in the toaster…”

I decided to carry out a little research on this for one litre of water, boiled in a one-litre electric kettle of 1010 Watts and recorded the following times for different times on different days:

0630hrs- 05:39:40 secs
0645hrs- 06:30:48 secs
0700hrs- 06:30:81 secs
1300hrs- 06:59:46 secs
1600hrs- 06:45:53 secs
1930hrs- 07:12:72 secs
2045hrs- 08:22:38 secs

Obviously, my small research tells us something: it is expensive and a rip off to use your iron, toaster, kettle or any other heating appliance in the evening but cheaper when you use them before 6:30 am and 6:30 pm. Why do we have to pay a premium for using our appliances during peak hours and less during ‘off peak’ hours? How come the same electricity supply can last 05:39:40 seconds at one time and 08:22:38 seconds at another time to power the same appliance for the same task? Try this at home if you are a savvy consumer.

The world consumer movement has long recognised that electrical energy is of fundamental importance to public welfare and the well-being of consumers worldwide. The satisfaction of basic needs is one of the basic rights of consumers.

Electricity supply in Ghana has poor coverage and poor continuity of supply as well. That is, many people have no network connection and many of those that are connected face frequent interruptions of supply and ‘power surges’. In Ghana, consumers are constantly having their appliances damaged by such surges, for which no compensation has ever been paid. Well, can the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) be sued?. YES! YES!! YES!!... and as a class action…

Due to this malfeasance of a public utility provider, consumers (especially businesses) have made their own ‘off grid’ arrangements, thus switching between grids or dropping out of the system. All of a sudden, this misfortune has opened our third eye to the availability an usefulness of solar power, no bitters required.

If the ECG cannot live up to the ‘50 years of Freedom’, why can’t other providers be encouraged to participate and unbundle the mess? Competition among generators can take place even within the public sector (as in Norway) but unbundling is frequently associated with the introduction of private sector participation (PSP).

Despite the difficulties there have been some relatively successful examples of PSP. In Peru there have been improvements in coverage (nationally from 52 per cent in 1990 to 76 per cent in 2003) and long-term reductions in real prices since privatisation of the principal generators in 1990. Chilean electrification rose from 53 per cent in 1992 to 76 per cent in 1999, relying heavily on PSP. However, in both Peru and Chile, much of this improvement was due to government led programmes to improve rural coverage in particular since 1993. There have also been some less successful examples. In El Salvador, the period since privatisation in 1998 has seen high tariff increases (64 per cent) while tariff subsidies have been diminished progressively. In Honduras, the relatively recent introduction of PSP has had little, discernible impact on coverage. On the other hand, there are relatively successful publicly owned networks too even in relatively poor countries such as Costa Rica where coverage has been very high for a long period of time, or Morocco where rural electrification rose from 19 per cent in 1995 to 39 per cent in 1999.

It is still uncertain whether unbundling and PSP will constitute a long-term improvement but certainly, we do not need more power for ‘free night calls’ on our electricity bills so that our kettles, toasters and irons must work not to the detriment of a good night’s sleep and our consumer power.

NEWSFLASH: Electricity consumers across the country can now take action against the Electricity Corporation of Ghana and its affiliate institutions for erratic power supply. A new policy by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) and the Energy Commission, which seeks to regulate the number of hours electricity providers can interrupt power supply in a year has been outdoored after the recent Public Sector Policy Fair. Good work by PURC and Energy Commission but is it just an action plan that was designed to be rolled out as an outcome of the policy fair or is it just a publicity stunt designed to make them look good?

Well, Ghanaian Consumers, time to get your ready reckoner, a calculator, a watchman, and a Lawyer of course! How do you prove power outage in your area? Was the wiring of your house done with 'To Papa Preko'? Have you not overloaded your limited output sockets in your home? Does your ECG Meter give you a printout of the quality of electricity supply to your end that sometimes go up to +/-15% beyond the 220 volts? Was is your neighbour that caused the ECG supply pole to fall down and cut the supply? Is it a monkey that was caught between the wires that caused that blackout...and you blame ECG for the jumpy monkey? What a cheap publicity stunt!

**(with excerpts from Consumers International (CI) research material)

PURCing the Ghanaian Consumer- A Comedy of Public Utilities

Jean Lukaz MIH, The Consumer Partnership-Ghana

Pronouncing verdicts may be an easy task for the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC), but PURCing the Ghanaian Consumer with oversize tariffs and with very little expectations other than promises from the monopolies of an electricity cartel and an Aqua-something-Vitens is not amusing.

Concocted Households?
By way of what is believed to be a ‘social tariff’ or government subsidy we are being made to believe that poorer consumers are protected. As if by design the average Ghanaian household since creation consumes within the 0-50 bracket, popularly referred to as the "lifeline" as well as rural consumers who hardly have electricity and worst of all have their meters physically removed by the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) for their inability to pay for their ‘lifelines’, the PURC may be the first to relieve itself of erratic and unsatisfactory utility supplies. Let’s see if the PURC on its new premises can afford and survive on pre-paid meters with their queuing subventions from a Government that constantly has over-outstanding and overdue utility bills that encourage utility service providers to underperform.

Monopolies versus Rights to Basic Needs and to Choice
The consumer right to satisfaction of basic needs includes the right to water and electricity. The first priority of all governments should be to make safe, affordable drinking and wastewater services as well as electricity available to all consumers and subsidies should be concentrated on poor consumers. The Consumer Partnership (The COP) believes that being monopolies for the sake of social good have created comfort zones for utility providers, thereby enabling them to muffle Ghanaian consumers from their right to choice. Unconscionable in their nature and existence by not warranting Ghanaian consumers an alternative other than the devil and the deep blue sea, we can only have to look over the fence to see one of the biggest oil suppliers with one of the highest per capita generator use in the world, a signature of unguaranteed promises and false expectations. Who owns what may not be the pre-eminent issue, but consumer protection is. This should be the guiding principle behind the regulation of utilities.

Price
Price controls should continue as long as public utility providers remain monopolistic. Price controls should take into account profit levels and rate of return on capital. The rate of return should be little more than is necessary for an industry to attract the necessary capital for investment. Increases in prices should be mitigated by reductions in non-payment and waste. Raising the proportion of consumers, both industrial and domestic, who pay their bills, would result in significant increases in revenue and reduce the pressure to raise tariffs. It would also be fairer than raising tariffs while significant numbers of consumers continue to avoid payment.

Coverage
The dilemma of who bears the investment cost of infrastructure extension is rendered less acute by efficiency gains. It is important to understand what costs are included in determining tariffs, and whether cost alone is the sole determinant of price. It is also important to understand the relationship between the price consumers pay and the true cost of running the utility as loading the cost onto present or new consumers can create unfair burdens. An important issue arises here as Ghanaian consumers believe they are bearing the cost of the inefficiency of utility service providers. The utility may also find it difficult to keep prices down if some large consumers, for instance government offices, do not pay their bills as is the case in Ghana.

False Expectations
Hoping to milk Ghanaian consumers in the short run to acquire some equipment of a kind may sound persuasive to gullible consumers whilst offering clear timelines for delivery of a purported improved service may be verboten and belated. For those that are asking Ghanaian consumers to consult President Obama for a dose of ‘Audacity of Hope’ from some West African Gas pipelines that have been overflowing with hot air, and a justification from a Jubilee anniversary platform that is yet to see the light of day, should rather consult their horoscope to see better times next year.

Big Ears, Small Voice
Safarying the country and PURCing the Ghanaian consumer in the guise of public hearings for what seemed to work in the interest of utility service providers, the mockumentary of ‘A Comedy of Public Utilities’ has finally been rolled out and PURC is definitely having a laugh as they can only hear themselves. Consumer Education (CE) roundtables have been elevated to high tables in star-rated hotel conference rooms where all classes of consumers, including rural utility consumers, play Ghostbusters. In fact, Ghanaian consumers hate rating the credibility of PURC, so please do not ask.

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