The Director General of the Ghana Education Service, Dr. Eric Nkansah, has confirmed that power has been restored to Accra Academy Senior High School.
According to him, the Free Senior High School Secretariat, which is in charge of paying the electricity bills of all the 704 second-cycle schools in the country, has been engaging the power distribution company and has settled all bills.
In an interview with JoyNews, he stated that all payments were current and no schools ought to have been disconnected based on their records.
“I have resolved this with the Managing Director of the Electricity Company and the school has been restored, so we do not expect to see what we saw yesterday,” he stated.
According to the Director General, there is pending meeting between the Ghana Education Service, the Electricity Company of Ghana, and the Free SHS Secretariat to go over how payments will be made on time to avoid future disconnections.
“I can assure you that based on the arrangement that we have and the ongoing discussions, we will certainly not be seeing those going forward,” he said.
Background
ECG on Monday, February 19, disconnected the school from the national grid due to an unpaid debt of over GH¢400,000. This resulted in a total blackout on the entire campus.
Paul Agraga, the head of prosecution at ECG, explained in an interview on Citi FM that “the disconnection is part of an ongoing initiative to recover outstanding payments owed to the company.”
“Normally, we have a team that goes around once a while to inform our customers of their debts so they do not accumulate and so if you take Accra Academy for example, they owe in excess of GH¢400,000 to the ECG.”
Mr Agraga emphasised the importance of ECG recovering the monies owed to pay off the power producers.
He dismissed the assertion that the company is targeting some selected senior schools.
