The Managing Director of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has registered his displeasure at the approaches the outfit has embarked on over the years as far as doing business is concerned.

Samuel Dubik Mahama said the enterprise is a viable one but its growth has been stagnated by its style of doing business.

He said what also is making it difficult to recover from the challenges is the fact that the state enterprise is not considering a critical dynamic shift in carrying out its operations, according to the director.

“Anybody who tells you this sector is not viable is a liar. It’s a very viable sector but our approach to business over the years is what has brought us to where we are. And we not looking at a critical dynamic shift in how we do our business operations,” he stated on JoyNews' Newsfile on Saturday.

Mr Dubik also lamented that the sector has seen no significant improvement before and since he joined.

According to him, a previous check on their system revealed that the ECG had about 7 million customers but the company’s billing system indicates that it has a total customer of 4.5 million, a figure which has not improved till the present day.

This, he expressed is also due to the outdated system which the company continues to operate.

The managing director said that it has been difficult trying to change the system because people are used to the old one and therefore always resist change. If the change were allowed, things would have improved significantly.

“To solve the problem, now you try to upgrade the system but people have been used to that and have found ways around it so they’re always resisting. But until you closed it, change the billing cycle, and change everything for it to be moving at its optimum now, you start realising that revenue assurance is not there, let’s put revenue assurance in place.

"You put revenue assurance in place, you realize that now you have a graph that is showing, now you can answer to how the graph is moving because initially, you were flying blind,” he added.

According to the boss, tariff increment is not the solution to the current problems plaguing the sector. He said the challenge has “physical operational issues” which require critical attention.

The ECG had been receiving threats from Independent Power Producers (IPP) over non-payment of debts of about $1.7 billion owed them.

The IPPs issued a statement that they were going to cut the power supply to the ECG should at least 30% of the debt not be paid by July 30.

However, the matter seems resolved as the IPPs have rescinded their decision after negotiations with government took place.