Pressure group Alliance for Accountable Governance (AFAG), is urging a further decrease in utility tariffs despite marginal cuts announced Tuesday. The three electricity companies in the country have agreed to charge less than what the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) approved for them. The Volta River Authority (VRA), Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCO) and the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) will each absorb 10 percent of the earlier increment effected in June, and which led to mass protests by industry and domestic consumers. The reduction follows an intervention by a committee set up by Vice President John Mahama and interest parties to explore ways to mitigate the impact of the upward adjustment on Ghanaians. But AFAG says it wants more. A leading member of the group, Kwabena Bonfeh, told Joy News on Tuesday the group is still consulting with stakeholders to put forward its own formula for billing consumers. “For us the inconsistency in the figures of increase is another worry; we only want to hope and believe that indeed the quantum of reduction we’ve been told would be true and that in the end it will in some way solve the problem of the overburdened [consumer].” Chief Executive Officer of the Volta River Authority, Kweku Andoh Awotwi, who doubled as spokesperson for the committee, said commercial consumers could expect their tariffs to come down by as high as 27 percent. Vice President John Mahama has welcomed the reduction and urged the PURC to consider gradual increment of tariffs instead of huge one-time upward adjustments. “We need to assist the utilities to be able to be sustainable and to be able to provide us with better service but we want to also say that the utilities should improve in efficiency in order that they don’t pass on costs that are not really relevant onto the consumer,” he said. According to him, the government looks forward to an “automatic adjustment” regime where increases in tariffs are done gradually based on certain key economic indicators. Director of Engineering at the ECG, Julius Kpekpena, says the reduction should not affect service delivery. According to him, the ECG is “implementing a number of projects” it intends to complete by December this year to bolster its service quality. On the automatic tariff adjustment, Mr Kpekpena said the billing scheme will help curtail the stir caused by increases that consumers deemed rather steep. Meanwhile, although the tariffs might have gone down by as much as 27 percent for commercial consumers, the Association of Ghana Industries (AGI) says it is still not enough to cushion industries. But the vice president managed to convince them to accept the present reduction while they explore ways of reviewing it in the near future. Source: Myjoyonline.com/Ghana