[ 2017-02-14 ]

Atomic Commission shutdowns labs; owes ECG GHC500,000
Ghana Atomic Energy Commission has admitted owing
the Electricity Company of Ghana over five hundred
thousand Ghana cedis (GHc 500,000).

According to the Commission, the amount was owed
before it was rolled onto the prepaid metering
system in 2015, which also added to woes of the
Commission.

Speaking in an interview with 3FM 92.7 on Monday,
February 13, 2017, the Director General of the
Ghana Atomic Energy Commission, Professor Benjamin
Nyarko said the situation has put “so much
pressure on the IDF [Internally Generated Fund]
that we are unable to buy electricity for all the
laboratories.”

Consequently, it laboratories have been shutdown,
and are periodically opened when the
Commission’s internally generated fund is able
to support the purchase of electricity credit.

“The agricultural department of the Commission,
which produces seedlings for farmers … you see,
farmers they don’t have much money and the
amount of electricity we buy we cannot get the
money from what they sell. So, that’s the most
difficult area,” he said.

Professor Benjamin Nyarko said that they have
written letters to the previous government to come
to their aid but to no avail.

“We wrote to the Ministry of Finance [during
former President Mahama’s government] saying
that our area is a highly security zone and,
therefore, we have to ensure that there is always
light so we don’t run into any problem.

“But they said the prepaid [metering] is a
government decision [which] they cannot give us
postpaid meter. We were thinking that they would
give us money, in advance, to buy the electricity
but no money came.”

He added that the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission
only wants constant supply of electricity, noting
that the staff are willingly buying their own
electricity to use in their various apartments.

Source - 3news.com

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