Prepaid Chaos: ECG Sets Up District Centres

The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has said that data centres in four districts have been set up to help resolve challenges of prepaid credit purchase.

The centres are located in Kaneshie, Achimota, Korle-Bu and Dansoman District Offices to cater for the areas that suffered challenges in the purchase of power.

The centres will serve as a central point within the district “where customers whose cards are dysfunctional will contact for the reactivation of their cards to enable them to vend”.

This was contained in a press release on Saturday, December 9 in which ECG appealed to affected customers to contact the district offices to have their problems resolved.

ECG further apologised for the inconvenience caused to customers and assured that “every effort is being made to immediately resolve this challenge”.

As early as 3am, hundreds of customers have been queuing at some ECG offices waiting for their turn to purchase prepaid credit.

ECG says they were having challenges with data servers and this resulted in chaos at the Regional office where hundreds of customers converged to have their challenges resolved.

Some of the frustrated individuals told Accra 100.5 FM’s Nana Amoako Gyampah that they have been unable to purchase prepaid credit from ECG for days and called for government’s intervention.

Meanwhile, the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has hinted at possible sanctions against the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) as over 2000 clients cannot purchase prepaid power due to server challenges.

A statement signed by PURC’s Executive Secretary Mrs Mami Dufie Ofori indicated on Thursday, December 7, that the commission has requested ECG to show reason why it should not be punished for the recent challenges.

PURC is “requesting the company (ECG) to show cause in respect of monetary penalties to be imposed with a response deadline of December 8, 2017 in accordance with due process”.

The commission further plans to undertake comprehensive independent investigations into ECG’s IT infrastructure to ascertain the root cause of the system failure which will inform further regulatory actions.

PURC said after investigations, they have ordered ECG to “immediately augment its help desks in all affected district offices to deal with the large number of customers and inform the public of the measures being undertaken to resolve the problem”.

Additionally, PURC has “issued initial time-bound directives to ECG to submit details of its emergency response measures carried out”.

Source: ClassFMonline