The Bono and Ahafo Area Manager of the Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo), Eugene Odoi Addo, has stressed the need for customers to stop delaying bills to accrue and rather make payment on time.

He said customers must pay for the service as they use it, because “once you do that you will be able to manage the bill and it will not grow to unmanageable levels to warrant disconnection”.

Mr Addo made the call in a media interview in Sunyani at the close of a revenue mobilisation exercise aimed at retrieving more than GH¢270 million owed by public institutions, private companies and individual customers in the Bono and Ahafo regions.

He bemoaned that indebtedness affected the company’s operations, recruitment, and acquisition of tools and machines to work with and consequently made the company indebted to its power producers.

Mr. Addo said prepaid meter usage by all customers was part of management's plan to address the issue of indebtedness, but that process could not be achieved once because the meters were expensive and therefore needed to be done gradually, “as we phase out the postpaid meters, we replace them with prepaid meters,” he added.

On the revenue mobilization exercise, he stated it had received positive feedback, especially meeting with Dr. Kofi Amo-Kodieh, the Bono Regional Director of the Ghana Health Service, whose health facilities were indebted to the NEDCo an amount of GHS 41.15 million in the Bono and Ahafo regions.

Mrr. Addo said all the Districts Health Directorates (DHDs) had been informed about the exercise, saying NEDCo would be engaging those DHDs to come up with payment plans regarding how the debt owed would be settled. 

Earlier, the NEDCo task force disconnected power to Ghana Water Company Limited’s Abesim headworks, Berekum headworks and the Nsoatre sub-station. The GWCL is indebted to NEDCo about GHS 14 million in its operational regions.