Ghana’s Vice President Dr Mahamudu Bawumia has accused the workers of the power distribution company, Electricity Company of Ghana, of sabotaging the government’s attempt to digitalise the revenue collection of the company.

The Vice President, who was speaking at the Annual General Meeting of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Africa, mentioned that some ECG IT unit employees installed ransomware to stop the company’s IT system from functioning correctly.

He said that the ransomware caused the system to crash and so the National Security had to step in to identify the employees responsible for the damage.

“Every month, they simply maintained it at GH¢450 million. I, thus, indicated that we needed to deploy a team to digitalise the Electricity Company of Ghana’s revenue collection. As a result, we sent a team and started the digitalisation process.

“Can you believe that system employees installed ransomware throughout the entire system to ruin it? And that’s when the system fell apart. In the end, we had to call in National Security to determine that some employees of the IT department were responsible.

“And we located the machine on which the ransomware had been introduced into the network. Restoring the system takes some time. To make this work at all, they demanded a ransom. Is that even possible to imagine?

“So, they were taken into custody. We also digitalised the system, restored it, and said that Ghana would no longer accept cash payments for electricity. You solely use electronic bank transfers and mobile money to make payments. That is presently the situation. Is it not astonishing that monthly receipts have increased to more than one billion cedis from GH¢450 million?” he quizzed.

The comments by the Vice President who is also the presidential candidate of the governing New Patriotic Party (NPP), have not settled well with the staff of the ECG.

A source within the top executives of the ECG workers union told this portal that the comments by the Vice President were not true.

“That is not true. ECG system was attacked before we started the cashless system as a company,” the source said.

It would be recalled that in 2022, some customers of ECG in parts of the Volta Region, Takoradi, Tema, Cape Coast, Kasoa, Winneba, Swedru, Koforidua, Nkawkaw and Tafo were unable to buy electricity credit due to metering system downtime.

The development brought frustrations to electricity users in the affected towns.

The incident happened before the ECG went cashless in 2023.

In March 2023, the managing director of ECG, Samuel Mahama, told the media that some staff of the ECG had been arrested for the meter glitch but failed to give further details.

It is more than a year now and Ghanaians are yet to know the identity of those staff and the type of punishment that has been meted out to them.

Source: https://energynewsafrica.com