It is a well-known fact that the Ghanaian utility systems; water and electricity, is a farce. All they need is the money and all they give are excuses as to why they can’t deliver to expectation. What is most annoying is that, they will never speak with words the lay man will understand, they will, like the politicians who spend monies they cannot account for, use words that a master’s degree holder in the English language will find difficult to understand, no matter the dictionaries he or she uses. What are the crimes of consumers?
Well, I can say that some consumers are not managers. They open their tabs and put on their lights when the natural sun shines bright, dwarfing the beams of the light, the water flows to no end and the thirsty earth drinks to its fill while they neglect it at the expense of one conversation or the other. Some too will not pay their utility bills. And for some, they never intend to pay utility bills so steal lines into their houses so either the light or the water flow ‘nichodemously’ to their houses.
This notwithstanding, those who do pay their bills must not be made to suffer the consequences of those who have been allowed to take these institutions for granted. You can buy an amount of units on your prepaid metre that must take you a month to use, within three days or even two, they develop legs and run back to their seller taunting you to go and get them with unbudgeted cash. When a complain is lodged, you can get so many excuses in terms you do not understand and the many questions force you to buy instead of standing or sitting there bandying words with confused people placed in complaint offices.
We know we cannot live without water. Water they say is life and when you have life, the elders will say, you have everything. Who will want to joke with such a thing? We also know that with the technological advancement in present times, we can never do without electricity. But the water companies do not give a ‘fuck’ as to how we get the water when they close the tabs. 90% of the time, they close these tabs without our knowledge. Then workers who did not plan this must either move around looking for just a bucket to bath or go to their work places with their ‘bathless’ bodies to risk incurring the displeasure of their bosses. Most unscrupulous government workers take these occurrences to mean a holiday in the public sector because of lack of supervision. Women and children especially from ‘carless’ homes must use their natural wheels to walk long distances in order to get water for cooking and other purposes.
What at all is the problem now? The frustrated market woman will ask. But the P.R.O.’s of these institutions will sit on radios and say things that they themselves cannot understand. They know they can get away with anything they do because water is a necessity we cannot afford to neglect. The elders say ‘if your finger is in the mouth of someone, you do not hit the person’s pate’ so we grumble for a while and we shut up.
The electricity companies do worse. Sometimes, we can just dance with their disco services. The lights go on and off, on and off, on and off until they decide to finally put it off for many days or some hours or leave it for some days to appease you. How can you complain? They always have alibis. The transformer here got burnt, or the wires there got burnt are some of their annoying excuses. One cannot afford to trust them with any electrical appliances. So you put them off at the first sign of their disco moves or you look for money to replace your appliances. And you can never think of leaving your machines on charge or on when you are not in the house. The worst case scenario is you losing even your house and everything in it when there is general fire. Why do we need to worry about our fridges even in our sleep? You find yourself ‘frigdeless’ when their disco play catches you in your beauty sleep.
And you want to compete with the developed nations, where even five minutes lights out in five years is considered an abomination? When at all will these utility managers stop taking us for granted? What at all do they need to be able to give us stable services? When can we sleep and be at ease without any problems? Must the work of those who use electricity be in the hands of these companies? Please sit up so you can have some peace and we can also have some peace. They might not say it to your hearing but you are being cursed at every time your services are in their ‘elements’ and the curses have their justifications. We are tired of poor services, we are tired of you regulating our schedules and we are tired of living under your fake promises.
Amoafowaa Sefa Cecilia (c) 2014.
Mum Cee 