Editorial: Extorting customers?  

There is something deeply troubling about a public utility that can, without any explanation, send a customer a bill of GH¢700 in February, issue nothing in March and then arrive with a GH¢24,000 demand on April 7 and – without any payment plan – the customer is given two weeks to pay or face consequences. This is not merely an administrative failure but an act of institutional aggression against the very people ECG exists to serve… and, sadly, this is not a rare scenario.

The only explanation the customer is given is that ECG is unable to read the meter and thus he is being charged an estimated tariff. What is the consumer’s liability that he must pay for the inefficiency of a service provider?

Estimated billing, in principle, is an acceptable bridging mechanism when meter reading is temporarily impracticable. In practice, as ECG operates it, the system has become a licence for financial extortion. There is no transparent methodology published for how estimates are computed. There is no reliable notification when a bill is being estimated rather than metered. And there is certainly no accountability when the estimates are grotesquely wrong. The customer bears all the risk while ECG bears none.

This is the enduring scandal of the public utility sector. The cost of operational failure is never absorbed by the institution that failed. It is passed, in full, to the citizens.

ECG cannot read meters consistently – the customer pays. ECG cannot invest adequately in metering infrastructure – the customer pays. ECG accumulates system losses running at over 30 percent and then seeks tariff increases – so, again, the customer pays.

The pattern is so entrenched it has ceased to provoke outrage. It should not be so.

How is it legally or morally defensible to issue a bill twenty-four times the size of the last verifiable one  and demand settlement within two weeks? What recourse does a low-income household or small business have against a state-backed monopoly that controls whether their lights stay on? And if ECG has, as it claims, digitised its billing processes with POS devices and advanced metering infrastructure, why are customers still receiving phantasmal bills that bear no relationship to their actual consumption?

Consumers are not opposed to paying for electricity. They are opposed to paying for incompetence. ECG must be compelled – by the PURC, by parliament and by sustained public pressure – to suspend punitive action on all disputed estimated bills pending independent review, publish its estimation methodology in plain language and fast-track the prepaid meter rollout as a matter of urgency.

Estimated billing should be the exception, time-limited and transparently disclosed, not a default mechanism for a utility that has not yet organised itself to do its basic job.

The meter, it seems, runs faithfully in only one direction: that is, against the customer.

 

The post Editorial: Extorting customers?   appeared first on The Business & Financial Times.

Read Full Story