The Municipal Chief Executive (MCE) for Yilo Krobo, Eric Tetteh has appealed to the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) not to use disconnection from the national grid as punishment for people who fail to pay light bills.

The ECG has disconnected electricity power supply to residents of Somanya, including the Yilo Krobo municipality for about a week. This has left residents within the municipality in darkness.

Explaining to Joy Prime's Roselyn Felli on Prime Morning on Tuesday, the MCE for the area stated that the power outage has caused a lot of harm to residents including hospitals as Covid-19 vaccines had to be transported to other places for storage.

He added that it is advisable for the ECG to target areas where people are posing problems and take them on instead of disconnecting the whole community.

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“…this vaccine that they use for Covid, they have to transport it to a nearby community to store it there, because it must be kept under a specific temperature.”

“I am appealing to ECG, we shouldn’t use disconnection or putting off light as a punishment for this kind of thing. For me, they should isolate the area where people are creating problems, and deal with them. It can be a curfew, it can be a situation where the security will be there to monitor that people do not tamper with the machines. So that the other people get it,” he said.

He also noted that cutting them off the national grid affects the local economy.

“One of the basic functions of the Municipal Assembly is to promote local economic development. We depend on individuals who are doing their businesses; we take taxes from them to develop the area. When you put off light, do you know the meaning of it? It means that everything will have to crash, and how do we sustain this…,” Mr. Tetteh noted.

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He has therefore urged the ECG to explain to residents, the relevance as well as the positive and negative effects of the ‘prepaid’ system since some people do not want it.

“The reason people who will be opposing a change will bring, can be reasons which are not good, but then it is important that you listen and use that opportunity to explain to them,” he urged. 

Residents have also pleaded with the ECG to reconnect the power to enable Senior High School (SHS 3) students to write their BECE successfully.