The Northern Electricity Distribution Company (NEDCo) has disconnected the Bagabaga College of Education, Tamale College of Education and the Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium in Tamale in the Northern Region from the national grid over high indebtedness.
The Bagabaga College of Education owes the electricity distributor an amount 4.1million cedis whereas the Tamale College of Education owe an amount of 3.5million cedis. The Aliu Mahama Sports Stadium on the other hand owes to the tune of 466,000 cedis.
The Managing Director of NEDCo, Mr. Osmani Aludiba Ayuba, who led management of the company on the first day of the month-long mass revenue mobilization exercise on Tuesday (April 18, 2023) said the company is at risk of a collapse because of their indebtedness to their suppliers.
However, authorities of these institutions during the visit of the NEDCo revenue mobilization team gave varied reasons and explanations to their accumulated arrears and pleaded for some graze period to settle the debts.
But Mr. Ayuba in his interaction urged the organizations to at least honor about 70 per cent of their respective arrears in order to remain connected to the national grid.
“We owe our suppliers, VRA and GRIDCo put together, we owe them in excess of 2 billion Ghana cedis and all our customers put together owe us just a little over 1.2 billion cedis; so even if we collect all the monies our customers owe us, we cannot pay our creditors” he lamented.
He added, “We buy transformers, we buy meters, cables, conductors, poles and all these has to be paid for and so if we supply the power and we don’t get the money to pay these liabilities then it means that it will get to a point where your supplier will refuse to give you the materials.”
Addressing Journalists, the NEDCo Managing Director said the first day exercise was generally a success for the team, adding “it is a success because we did not receive money in those three institutions but we were able to take them off the grid and for that matter, we will believe that action that we took will compel them to come up with some payments in the very near future.”
Meanwhile, Mr. Ayuba assured all defaulting customers will be treated equally assuring there will be no discrimination against any individual customer or organization in the ongoing exercise.
In a related development, the Tamale Technical University (TaTU) which also owes the Northern Electricity Distribution Company an amount of 2.2 million cedis promised to issue a check of GHS100,000 on Wednesday, April 19, to settle some of the debts.
The two organizations further agreed to roll out a payment plan to accelerate the payment of the debt over a period of time.
