Energy Minister urges ECG to open up for new ideas

Management of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) on Thursday held its second national retreat to deliberate on challenges confronting the company.

The three day retreat is on the theme, “positive attitude: key to ECG’s success”.

Mr Emmanuel Armah Kofi-Buah, Minister of Energy and Petroleum, urged the management of the ECG to open up to new ideas and processes that create positive changes and would bring about efficiency and effectiveness in their operations.

He said there is the need for management to make good use of every human resource at their disposal to make the ECG an enviable institution in the entire nation.

To achieve these however, the Minister urged them to introduce mechanisms to deal with some staff of the EGC who allegedly connive with some people to cheat the company.

This, he said, calls for strict discipline and right attitude towards work at all levels, saying “good work must be rewarded whilst lackadaisical attitude towards work must be seriously sanctioned”.

He said the huge investments injected to address the challenges would be in vain if strict adherence to discipline and negative practices was not observed.

Mr Buah impressed on the management to intensify its public communication to keep customers’ abreast with any challenges they faced to enable them plan effectively against such power outages.

Mr William Hurton-Mensah, Managing Director of the ECG, said despite the huge investment injected to improve the operations of the company, many customers were still not satisfied and therefore “we are here to find out what we can do to change and correct the impression”.

He said the ECG “continues to see the declining trend in system losses from a high rate of about 26.2 percent in 2011 to about 19.8 percent by the end of 2012”.

Mr Hurton-Mensah said the institution has observed improvement in revenue collection describing it as encouraging as “in 2012 revenue collection was about 92 percent but 104 percent for private customers only”.

He said that while project implementation was progressing “we have not yet reached our goal because our customers continue to experience poor electricity services”.

He said Ghanaians were still dissatisfied with their role as an electricity distribution company and every strategy should be adopted to correct the impression.

The Managing Director entreated the management and staff to come out with ideas and raise relevant issues that would help overcome the challenges they face, adding that they were all capable of transforming their individual areas of operation.

“Success for ECG would be achieved through proper and strict supervision as well as the passion to drive, motivate and encourage employees to work assiduously to achieve our goals and objectives even in the midst of challenges and extraordinary circumstances”.

Source: GNA