By Philip Tengzu
Wa, (UW/R), April 6, GNA – The Public Utility Regulatory Commission (PURC) has held its maiden Consumer Clinic in Wa to create an avenue for utility consumers to share their challenges and complaints for redress.
The forum also provided a platform for the PURC to strengthen its education on the rights and responsibilities of utility consumers and how to demand those rights.
Addressing participants, Mrs Nancy Atiemo, Director of Legal Services at the PURC, who spoke on behalf of the Executive Secretary of the PURC, said the Consumer Clinic, which had been held in other parts of the country, was to empower the consumers to demand value for paid services.
“It is when you are empowered that you can ask the best question and you are able to demand your rights so that you get value for money.
“After all, it is the consumer that pays for the service that the utility companies are providing, without the consumers the companies will not exist”, she explained.
The participants were also educated on the Tariff Reckoner Mobile Application to enable them to know how much they ought to pay for the utilities they bought.
Mrs Atiemo said it was the first of its kind on the continent for a regulator to develop that kind of Mobile Application and made it freely available to consumers.
She explained that the motive of the application was to strengthen transparency in utility tariff charges as the consumers could determine whether they were over-charged for the utility services they bought or not.
Professor Philip Duku Osei, the Vice Chancellor of the SD Dombo University of Business and Integrated Development Studies, who Chaired the event, observed that the importance of the PURC could not be over-emphasised due to the teething challenges in the utility sector.
He explained that the government set up the PURC considering the monopoly in the utility sector in the country, which called for the need for an effective regulator to police the sector.
Prof. Duku explained that the regulator would “ensure that citizens and consumers also get value for money for the tariffs they pay for and companies which have also invested will have an opportunity to maximise their profits while offering good or excellence service for the citizens of the country.”
Mr Saeed Abdul Shakur, a Principal State Attorney in the Upper West Region, commended the PURC for creating the opportunity to educate the utility consumers in the region.
While underscoring the need for the service providers to provide quality service to customers, he also urged consumers to use the service – electricity and water – very judiciously.
“Nothing is as expensive as power outage. I have gotten to a point where I have realised that I must pay for the power that I use but I must insist that in supplying this power we must have quality service,” he said and identified the power fluctuations experienced in recent times as disheartening.
In a presentation, Mr Bashiru Nuhu Amin, the Upper West Regional Public Relations Officer of the PURC, noted that the regulator received a total of 1,123 complaints from the public in 2022.
Out of the number, 999 were against the Northern Electricity Company while 124 were against the Ghana Water Company Limited.
He said the complaints were in the areas of damaged equipment, unlawful disconnection, quality of service, and metering, among others, and urged the public to report complaints regarding utility services to the PURC for redress.
GNA