…for poor service delivery
Posted: The Chronicle | Friday, October 16, 2009
By Charles Takyi-Boadu
The National Coalition against Privatisation of Water (NCAP) is considering the option of dragging the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) and Aqua-Vitens Rand Limited (AVRL) to court for what it describes as poor service delivery.
This option would become effective, if all the petitions and interventions it has brought against the two companies fail to yield the desired results.
The group has already petitioned the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), and was in the process of sending another petition to the Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ), to investigate AVRL’s inability to meet their performance targets, as well as the claim that they made about GH¢30million profit, which has been denied by the GCWL.
In an interview with The Chronicle in Accra yesterday, the Southern Coordinator of NCAP, Alhassan Adams, said this was part of its quest to protect water as a public asset, and bring sanity into the sector.
He accused Aqua-Vitens of poor service delivery, and the GCWL of poor supervision.
According to him, only four low-lift pumps which pump water from intake points at the dam to the treatment plant at Weija are functioning.
Alhassan said most of the chemical dosage machines were lying obsolete, whilst filters were not working properly, stressing, “Chemicals are applied through trial and error.”
He stressed: “they do not test for the presence of heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cyanide and arsenic.”
To him, recent studies by the WACAM, gives an indication that there are high levels of these heavy metals present in the Western Region.
For this reason, he noted, that there were always chances of over-dosage or under-dosage of chemicals to treat water.
This, according to him, amounts to poor standards in the provision of quality water, whilst exposing consumers to great health risk.
He described as abysmal, the performance in the sale of water, indicating that sales for the year 2007 and 2008 did not meet the annual targets, laying emphasis on the fact that there were shortfalls of 13.4% in 2007, and 20.2% in 2008. “These are unacceptable performances from the operators (AVRAL),” he added.
The NCAP also expressed grave concern over the alleged victimisation of the company’s staff and union leaders who seek to protect public interest and workers rights.
One of the key issues NCAP has raised about the management contract between the GWCL and AVRL is the reduction of Non-Revenue Water (NRW) by 5% each year.
Per the contract estimation, this should have been 40% in 2008, but Alhassan claims that it is 51.7%, that is 11.7% higher than the target.
According to him, there has been only a 2% increase in production, mainly due to expansion works at Dalum (Tamale), Sekyere Hemang and Bafiakrom in the Central Region, with only a 1% increase in installed capacity.
The National Coalition Against Privatisation of Water (NCAP) has thus called on the SFO and CHRAJ to launch investigations into the performance of AVRL and GWCL, using the management contract’s performance indicators.
The group has repeated its call on the government to abrogate its contract with the company, since it had failed to deliver the expected results.