Telecom Company, Vodafone is impressing on government, the need to fix the power crisis as soon as possible.

According to the company, this is important to avert the negative impact on its operations as well as government revenues. The company says the crisis has already almost tripled the company’s cost on fuel, compared to last year which has unduly led to a sharp decline in revenue.

The Head of External Affairs, Gayheart Mensah has been outlining the underlying factors to Joy Business.

"People are not buying scratch cards and they're not making calls because they don't have their devices to use for most part of the day because there's no electricity and we are seeing the impact of this on our revenue.

“The potential impact is on the quality of service that we deliver to our customers. You need also to look at it from the point of view of cost of production. The telecom industry relies a lot on energy. All our sites that you see across the country - the masts, the 3G sites that we build and all that are powered by energy.

“When there is a challenge with energy as we have today, we have no choice but to rely on diesel which is even more expensive. It is impacting on our cost of production and again having an impact on the revenue that we're generating."

According to him, this is only a wake-up call for government to urgently address the power crisis to forestall possible far-reaching economic consequences.

"When businesses operate and generate profits, that is what enables them to invest a lot more in their operations and so when you don't have your power generation right for such an industry, it affects investment decisions. We don't need to under-estimate the potential impact of this on government revenue because revenue that we generate as telcos, as businesses, across various industries are the very revenues that feed into government revenue.

“We do appreciate the enormous efforts that government is putting in, in order to address this issue. But to the extent that we're still going through the challenge, we'll continue to urge government to expedite all initiatives that they have in order to resolve this issue quickly” he concluded.