Gov’t Slaps Higher UTILITY Tariffs On Ghanaians -Amidst Covid-19

Against all pleas, the government through the Public Utilities Regulatory Commission (PURC) has announced the enforcement of new charges that will send water and electricity tariffs through the roofs, Whatsup News can confirm.

An intercepted circular from the PURC shows that from April 1, 2020, the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), the Northern Electricity Distribution Company Limited (NEDCO) and the third power distributor, Enclave Power Company Limited (EPCL) will be paying between GHp 2.0 to GHp 7p per kilowatt-hour in what the PURC calls Transmission Service Charges (TSC) for transmission losses and recovery cost for transmission.

This cost is expected to be passed on to both residential and non-residential consumers.

Aside this charges that are expected to be passed on to consumers, consumers themselves will be paying between GHC 2.13 to GHC 7.5 every month as service charges.

Meanwhile on Water tariffs, consumers are expected to pay more: between GHC 3.3 to GHC 5.6 per 1000 litres of water. Additionally, consumers would be forced to cough out GHC 6 per month in service charges.

This means that overall, Ghanaian consumers who are already devastated by the effects of the deadly Covid-19 coronavirus would be forced to pay more for both water and electricity.

Already, in what has been described as “unfair” and “insensitive” by critics, the government chose the Covid-19 lockdown period to slap increments in ex-pump prices of petroleum and Liquefied Gas (LPG).

The government’s decision to increase these rates is in total conflict with calls by civil society groups for the government to provide a reprieve to consumers by relaxing cost of living during the Covid-19 pandemic.

CUTS International is an independent non-profit economic policy research and public policy think-tank had pleaded with the PURC to review electricity tariffs for all classes of electricity consumers because the drastic drop in world market prices for crude oil means the operational cost of power distributors will drop significantly.

Mr. Adomako said “all over the world, countries that depend on natural gas and fuel have seen prices of electricity going down and for that reason, Ghana cannot be an exception to this obvious reality,” said Appiah Kusi Adomako, the Country Director CUTS Ghana during a media encounter in Accra.

However, the Akufo Addo-led administration had done the exact opposite of what experts expected from public utility service providers in the country.