Is ECG cruel or just clueless?
Joy FM’s Saturday morning programme has a unique tradition of crowning a person or an institution as the “Tonoo of the week”. It is not a compliment.
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“Tonoo” is an Akan expression whose meaning follows the abject sound of the word when it is properly pronounced. It means clueless beyond repair like being thrown into prison without the possibility of parole.
To label a person or an institution as “tonoo” is to condemn that entity with no hope of redemption. The Joy FM crew can save themselves the weekly trouble and just award an enhanced and renewable version - “Tonoo of the Decade” to our own Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).
Or, is there another way to explain the ECG’s apparent inability to do its job properly? Could it be that ECG has become so contemptuous of its customers that it no longer cares about what we say to the point of biting the hand that feeds it?
Take this example from the Daily Graphic of last week Friday, January 24: Mr William Boateng, Public Relations Officer of ECG, told the newspaper that the company had embarked on a power management exercise which entails cutting the supply of electricity to consumers anytime GRIDCo prompts it to do so.
According to the report, Mr Boateng said “there was no hope of stabilisation of supplies…”.
In plain English, this is what the ECG PRO is saying. We really can’t be bothered that much about our customers. After all, we don’t generate the electricity so anytime the supplier reports a shortfall, we will cut your power.
Mr Boateng goes on to provide a catalogue of excuses for GRIDCo’s inability to supply the full demand of electricity and then said rather tamely that “these are challenges in the system which are being worked on.”
With those words, the spokesman for one of Ghana’s biggest companies surrendered any further effort to explain how consumers could cope with a bad situation.
It is evident over the years that the concept of customer care is beyond ECG’s understanding, or perhaps blinkered by its monopoly mindset.
The company does not really care what its consumers feel or think about its operation. After all, there is nothing anyone of us can do. We can’t even go to the Supreme Court about this one.
It is easy to understand and perhaps even appreciate how ECG’s thinking has become so complacent and blasé about its failures. After all, the company does not generate the power it supplies to its customers and it can only supply what is generated for it to supply so it almost has no responsibility towards the customers except to pass on whatever inconvenience GRIDCo passes on to it.
Indeed, in the same newspaper report, Mr Boateng disclosed that his organisation and GRIDCo were working on a plan to ensure that information was provided to customers blah blah and more blah.
As a customer, I have no contract with GRIDCo. Would it not be far better for all concerned if ECG were eliminated completely so that customers would deal directly with the power generator and carrier?
It appears that the whole idea of splitting of the electricity business into generators, carriers and suppliers was to enable ECG to shift the blame on to someone else, in this case, GRIDCo or whoever fits the bill at any given moment.
In fact, even the customer was blamed in the self-same article. Hear this: “he (Mr Boateng) said although tariffs were adjusted at the beginning of the year, the company was still not achieving full cost recovery as people were paying far less than what they consumed…”
Cost recovery has become the chimera with which inefficiencies are excused and customer complaints batted away. However, full cost recovery is a dubious concept, perhaps even an illusion.
Given the way money and value behave in any economy, it may not be strictly possible for all costs to be recovered at any given moment.
This is why planning is so essential in the management of any entity. In any case, Mr Boateng’s complaint that people “were paying far less than they consume” is false.
Here is the reality. As a prepaid customer, I cannot pay less than what ECG says I am due. Instead, I pay interest-free money to ECG every time I load my prepaid card. Do I get full service? The answer is HELL NO!
There is hardly a day without power cut where I live and I know it is not a unique situation. Despite having paid in full, we receive substandard service, sometimes several notches below expectations.
ECG’s customers are a patient lot deserving of better respect and treatment than what we are offered. Although we all cried through and made painful fun about “dumsor”, that programme of planned power cuts which has now been abandoned for political and management reasons, was the proper way to go.
At least with properly administered “dumsor”, you know when to expect power, but of course, such a programme embarrasses the government and imposes extra work on ECG. Is it not easier to use the random route and blame everything on GRIDCo?
The worst aspect of ECG’s lack of customer care is its lack of communication. Take what happened last weekend as an example. We lost power early Saturday morning; there was no panic because it is not unusual to lose power, especially on Saturday mornings. However, as morning stretched into afternoon and the afternoon dissolved into evening alarm bells started ringing.
To cut a long and miserable story short, it was not until Sunday afternoon that power was restored. In that time, ECG made no announcement and customers were literally in the dark.
The following day, I heard from a friend of a friend (yes, as an ECG customer rumours are your best route to enlightenment) that the cause of the 30-hour-long power cut was due to a cable fault on an illegal connection under a kiosk.
Now, this is the juiciest part: it took that long to restore the power because the job needed a crane and ECG had difficulty finding one on the Saturday.
I hope it is not true; no, actually I hope it is true because it fits the ECG picture rather neatly and it is a far better excuse than blaming GRIDCo.
That Ghana’s main electricity supplier struggled to find a crane in an emergency! Things can only get better.
Is the ECG just clueless or has it developed institutional heartlessness due to its size and monopoly status?
The solution — and this is not the first time this is being suggested — is to split ECG into about three or four companies so they can compete for customers.
This would give customers some choice and control and improve efficiency and value for money.
Come to think of it, the notion of one gargantuan organisation holding on to POWER and doing as it pleases with it is an abomination to our democracy. Or maybe it is even unconstitutional? It ought to be!