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The Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG), has explained that some of its customers in the national capital, Accra, are struggling to buy prepaid credit for their meter, due to technical hitches with their servers dedicated to the pre-paid system.

ECG customers in some parts of Accra have not been able to buy prepaid for past three days, as long queues have been experienced at various vending points.

Residents of Achimota, Kaneshie, Dansoman and Korle bu, and surrounding areas, have been the most affected by the problem.

Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, the Head of Communications at ECG, William Boateng, acknowledged the problem and said their IT experts are working on addressing it. 

“We had a challenge, and it was Sunday evening that we got hint of some technical hitch with our server that is serving the BOT prepayment system, and we are talking about Achimota district, Kaneshie district, Dansoman district and Korle bu district. We had a problem with the server, it was not responding to the data of our customers.”

He also noted that, the data of customers have been migrated unto a new server, and the system is currently running but a bit slow.

“As at Tuesday afternoon, our ICT experts had transferred the data onto a new server. So we started serving from Tuesday. I know it will be slow because of the numbers we are dealing with but this [Wednesday] morning, I’ve been updated and I know we are on course. If you go on our website we said that we are still working on it, and that it has not been completely resolved,” Mr. Boateng added.

Smart meters to be rolled out in 2018

On the rolling out of smart ECG meters to forestall long queues are vending stations, Mr. Boateng said they will roll it on a large scale basis from next year.

By using the smart meters, customers will be able to buy prepaid credits in the comfort of their homes using their phones with the help of an App.

The ECG Head of Communications while speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show, said currently only a few areas in Accra use smart meters, adding that they would need a lot of funds to replace the non-smart meters with the smart ones.

He further assured that “we will work something out and God willing by first quarter of next year it will take off.”