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THERE IS AN uneasy calm at Teshie-Nungua in the Ledzokuku-Krowor Municipal Assembly (LEKMA) following the replacement of a new pre-paid meter without prior notice to residents and consumers.

Their frustration is borne out of the fact that without notice, officials of the Electricity Company of Ghana within the municipality have been replacing their meters without informing them about it.

For the past three days, the situation has intensified and is breeding tension within the area. What is more worrying is that the network system for recharging the pre-paid credit unit for the new meters is off, making residents using the new meters to sleep in darkness.

Again, residents say despite having credit units on their old prepaid meters, they are surcharged with GH¢30.00 before the new meter can read and subsequently have access to electricity.

The affected users who spoke to DAILY HERITAGEwere mostly residents of Teshie, Nungua, Spintex, Sakumono and Batsonaa and surrounding areas within LEKMA.

According to them, though they lost some huge units of credits when the their old meters were being installed, nobody came to their aid the situation appears to have repeated itself and appeared to continue unabated.

New meter network off

A visibly disturbed Jonathan Afotey Odai, a resident of Nungua,told the paper he could not understand why the situation at prepaid vendor joints in the whole of Nungua is frustrating.

He said, “I have been to almost four different places and I still cannot get any units to buy. The queue alone is frustration and it takes about 30-40 minutes to attend to one person and the number of people here is frustrating,” he told the paper.

One Charity Tetteh at Teshie was wondering how GH¢40.00 worth of units he purchased to load the new meter could finish in just three days.

“We are three tenants sharing a common meter. Before we realised the following day, our meter has been changed and we were not aware. I went there to recharge only to realise the old meter had been replaced. I saw a piece of paper asking me to come to the head office at Lashibi,” a visibly disturbed landlady shared her frustration with the paper.

“With the old one, we could buy GH¢100 and use it for two weeks…but now on Friday we bought that and just Monday it was finished and now we want to recharge but the network is not working.

William Bortey at Nungua Cold Store warned the ECG and the government to treat Ghanaians well, saying, “We are already suffering from the harsh economic conditions so they cannot consume our monies like that.”

According to him, many people have been complaining about deductions from their credit units and questioned the integrity of ECG officials since they had not done anything about the situation.

Some of the vendors visited said for the past three days they had been having challenges with network and expressed the hope the challenge would be resolved for them to serve their customers well.