TheRevenue Protection Unit (RPU) of the Accra East Region of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) last year recovered GH¢6,168,151.45 from illegal power connections within its operational area.The districts where the illegal connections were recorded in the region are Makola, Legon, Roman Ridge, Teshie, Kwabenya, Dodowa and Mampong.

Revenue protection

The Manager of the RPU of the Accra East Region of the ECG, Mr Jonathan Asante, who made this known in an interview with the Daily Graphic, said the region detected and mainstreamed 4.74 gigawatts (GWh) of energy which would have been lost to illegal connections in 2018, adding that the energy recovered in gigawatts represented a significant leap from the 1.8GWh retrieved in 2017.

He explained that the “units retrieved translated into GH¢6,168,151.45 revenue recovery for the company and was a 112.8 per cent increase over the 2017 figure of GH¢2,897,535.34”.

He said in the year under review, the region intensified loss control activities by visiting the premises of 22,445 residential and non-residential customers.

Mr Asante added that of the customers visited, 813 were surcharged for illegal power connection on their premises.

Loss control

The Coordinator of the RPU of the Accra East Region, Mr Moses Kutsienyoh, said the illegalities were identified during routine checks by personnel of the company, who examined the nature of electricity connection by customers and the “integrity of their meters”.

He said illegal connections were at the centre of the financial challenges facing the company.

“The ECG continues to incur losses from meter tampering, bypasses, unauthorised service connections, self-reconnection, among other things,” he added.

Mr Kutsienyoh said the day and night monitoring of customers’ premises would be sustained and continuously intensified to ensure that residents and institutions adhered to laid down regulations.

Prosecution

For his part, the General Manager of the Accra East Region of the ECG, Ing. Abdulai Kurah, said the region had made important strides by aggressively increasing the penetration of smart prepaid meters and was continuously working on reducing losses to improve its revenue.

He said the public needed to know that the ECG was backed by a Legislative Instrument to prosecute any person who engaged in an illegality and urged the public to cooperate with the company to address the problem of illegality by reporting those who engaged in such acts.