Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Samuel Dubik Mahama, says the company intends to meter all its distribution transformers across the country to fight power theft.

According to him, the electricity company loses millions of cedis annually as a result of power theft.

He mentioned that two out of every three prepaid meter has been tampered with, thus consumers are not paying the right tariffs.

He was speaking in relation to a nationwide anti-power theft/ electricity bill collection exercise which has seen both private and public institutions being disconnected for failure to pay their tariffs.

Speaking on JoyNews’ PM Express, he explained that this is part of effort to retrieve monies owed the electricity company.

“For every 10 customers, five of them are post-paid the other five are prepaid. With the five prepaid, three of them are legit, they haven’t tampered with their meter, two have tampered with their meter so they’re not paying what they’re supposed to be paying.

“They’re consumers alright, they’re on my record but they’re not paying the right tariff because they’ve either bypassed the meter or they’ve tampered with the meter. Let’s not forget we’ve discovered places where when the person was even building the house he had planned. So he’s built the pipers in the wall, so those things are so difficult to see with the naked eye,” he said.

Speaking about the meters for the distribution transformers, he mentioned that it will enable them measure how much power has been consumed in a particular area, and how much power has been unaccounted for.

“But very soon, after we meter all the distribution transformers, we will know how much power has been put into a specific transformer within an area, so now we have to compare it to each meter and that will be done by an algorithm by the system so we’ll know which houses to speak to, because tariffs cannot go up and you ever since it is the same 300 that you’re buying. So you never go up? Now we have data so we’re just collating all of that,” he said.

He urged all Ghanaians to go settle their electricity bills in order to avoid any embarrassment from electricity tariff collectors.

“I’ll just entreat the good people of Ghana to do the right thing. We all don’t want to be embarrassed. We all want to make sure we’re paying for the right service so when we’re demanding quality service, we as ECG will not have any moral right not to give you the quality service,” he said.