Govt Sells ECG - Workers Allege 

Korle-Bu ECG staff demonstrate yesterday
Three thousand employees of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) would be laid off next year following the decision of the government to sell the company.

An official of ECG in Cape Coast, Seth Birinkorang, who also doubles as the maintenance officer in the area, told Peace FM and its sister station, Okay FM, at the weekend and yesterday respectively that government was on the brink of selling the ECG and the sacking of the managing director of the company, Rev William Hutton-Mensah, was to pave way for the company to be sold.

According to him, a high-profile meeting by the government and other stakeholders in the industry took place on November 14 in Tema on preparations to sell the company.

He said government saw Rev. Ing. Hutton-Mensah as a stumbling block to its decision to immediately sell the ECG because he had consistently been opposed to the sale or privatisation of the company and therefore his removal was to pave way for the sale to take place.

He explained that the recent worsening power situation is on purpose and also a grand scheme by government, in collaboration with some people at GRIDCo, to put ECG in a bad light so that the proposal to sell it would receive public endorsement.

“The recent power outages are not the making of the ECG because we do not generate electricity but only distribute so we can only distribute what GRIDCo makes available to us,” Birinkorang said, adding that the ECG could not be blamed for the worsening situation of power outages in the country.

“The government wants the ECG to be sabotaged so that public anger would be whipped against ECG workers since we deal with the final consumer directly,” he underscored.

The ECG official said there is no interruption of electricity to the northern sectors of the country because the Volta River Authority (VRA) supplies electricity directly to them without any intermediary and so the situation currently being experienced in the southern sectors should be put squarely at the doorstep of GRIDCo,  who are the intermediary suppliers.

Meanwhile, workers of ECG across the country have embarked on protests, asking the government to reinstate the sacked managing director because he is only being used as a 'scape goat' and that according to them , the managing director had rather helped to transform the operations of the ECG, making them more responsive to customers' needs.

By Thomas Fosu Jnr