3 Groups kick against tariff adjustment
Three political pressure groups, the Committee for Joint Action (CJA), Alliance for Accountable Governance (AFAG) and the Young Patriots, have questioned the basis for tariff adjustments by the Volta River Authority (VRA), Ghana Grid Company Limited (GRIDCo) and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).
They said once the energy providers were not able to address problems including poor response to complaints, lack of proper maintenance of equipment and transmission lines, wastage and inefficient delivery of services, among other things, they were not comfortable with the 166 per cent end-user tariff adjustment being demanded.
Representatives of the groups, Messrs Kwasi Adu of the CJA and Abu Ramadan, Arnold Boateng, Davies Opoku and Richard Nyamah of AFAG made their concerns known at a stakeholders meeting on the 2013 major tariff review process organised by the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) in Accra last Wednesday.
The groups were not convinced about demands made by the energy service providers.
Mr Adu, for instance, said there should be a complete value for money analysis of the performance of the ECG before the company could ask for any increases in tariff.
He, among other things, questioned who set the benchmark of 21 per cent of transmission losses for the ECG and cited the Auditor General’s Report for 2011, which indicated that the company spent about 20 per cent of its available income on maintenance while 60 or more per cent were spent on salaries.
“I think that when organisations come to the public to ask for increases in tariffs and they give us a long list of things they need, we need to go into why sometimes they are asking for these because, otherwise, every year they would come and tell us that we need this and it would be like collecting water with a basket and it would go on and on,” he said.
Mr Ramadan, for his part, said the problems that existed before that last major increases in tariffs were still there and did not see why the demand for increase in tariffs again.
He asked what was being done to reclaim moneys owed by government institutions and agencies, the major hospitals and universities as far as the use of power was concerned.
