President John Dramani Mahama has underscored the government’s commitment to resolving the indebtedness of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).

Speaking during a discussion at the 2025 African CEOs Forum Awards in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, President Mahama said upon his assumption of office for a second term, he inherited an energy sector that was messed up with debts of almost $2.5 billion owed to independent power producers and gas suppliers.

He noted that the energy sector had been number one in terms of priority areas as part of the government’s agenda. “They’ve been trying to renegotiate the debt and then see how we can ring-fence it. We have some strategies for dealing with it and I’m sure that by the end of the year, early next year, we should be able to make everybody happy in terms of dealing with that debt,” the President said.

“We need to clean the slates but in cleaning the slates, we must look at the whole value chain because a lot of the problem is coming from downstream, the distribution and because of the state-owned utility, ECG is not as efficient in collecting revenue.”

President Mahama said Ghana was experiencing technical and commercial losses of about 40 per cent.

He said the Government was planning a private sector participation in the billing and metering to bring efficiency in the revenue collection of ECG to be able to pay the independent power producers.

“We established a cash waterfall mechanism where ECG’s revenues were supposed to be shared proportionately so that everybody got something every month. Unfortunately, it was not followed and so a lot of debt accrued,” President Mahama said.

“We’ve gone back to the cash waterfall mechanism and we’re adhering to it properly, so everybody is seeing something every month while we fix the distribution end.”

Touching on the issue of privatization of the downstream operations of ECG such as billing and metering, the President said, he had heard of interest from private investors to tap into the downstream economy, however, he had told them that they should wait.

He said the Government was going to do expressions of interest and that they just got the report from the Committee that was advising them.

He said the Committee had given them three options and that the first option was to go for one concession holder for the whole country to do the billing and metering.

While the other was to divide the country into concession areas and have multiple partners working with them in this billing and metering.

He reiterated that the Government was yet to take a decision.

President Mahama said the Committee’s report was going to come to Cabinet and that Cabinet would decide on which option they were going for, after which they would do an expression of interest.

The President underscored the need for Ghanaian participation in the ECG downstream operations privatization.

“There must be Ghanaian participation. There must be local participation. So even if it’s an international company, it must have a local partner,” he said.

“I’m sure by next year our partners would be happy because we would have dealt, you know, appropriately with their debts overhang.”