Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), Samuel Dubik Mahama, says with a sustained mass disconnection exercise, ECG will be able to drastically reduce its commercial losses.

Currently, the ECG is owed GH₵5.7billion by defaulting companies, private and public customers.

Private manufacturing industries and mining firms are the highest debtors, followed by some government institutions.

According to Samuel Mahama, the digitalisation of ECGs services as well as the revenue mobilisation drive will help reduce the losses in that sector.

“Administrative and collection losses come together to make commercial losses. So with that one, we’re hoping to see a drastic reduction because we have digitalized from end-to-end. So with the commercial and administrative, we’re hoping to see some very huge drastic loss in that,” he said on PM Express.

Meanwhile, technical losses he said would be quite a challenge to tackle.

According to him, the technical losses include the changing of faulty meters, the metering of distribution transformers among other capital intensive measures, thus while there are processes being initiated to reduce the losses there, it could take some time to see a major reduction in losses.

“But then the technical side will demand a lot of equipment and all of that. One being able to meter all the distribution transformers; two, we’d also be able to know the true customer numbers of ECG – we have a fair idea, but we don’t know the true numbers because of the illegal connections and at some point some people walking around having what they call political meters,” he said.

On political meters, he noted that the ECG is taking steps to regularise all of them in order for them to reflect on ECG’s accounts.

“They’re still in the system because how they were given the meters they were not captured by ECG. They have the meters but they’re not on our books with the requisite accounts and account numbers and all of that.

“And I will encourage everybody to help so we get the right numbers, because believe you me with the right numbers, we can get a reduction in tariff,” he said.