Managing Director of Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL), Dr Clifford Abdallah Braimah, has justified the decision that led to the termination of a billing system contract with IT firm, SOFTtribe Limited.
Key reasons include a sharp shortfalls in the utility company’s revenue.
“The contract with SOFTtribe is terminated and if they have any legitimate concerns, they should seek redress in court,” he said.
At a press conference on Thursday at GWCL headquarters in Accra, Dr Braimah disclosed that the company’s billing system developed problems that SOFTtribe was unable to resolve despite haven given them enough time to do so.
The MD, Dr Braimah also mentioned some four main problems that were impeding GWCL’s operations to include inconsistency between the balance on statement of account of customers and their water bills. He said this made it difficult to tackle customers’ queries.
He said, another confrontation was that the IT software which was installed in 2016 detected some fault and by 2018 it had started billing customers with wrong tariffs; also the e-readers were not functioning.
“All these problems also made it impossible for the GWCL to monitor the entire billing process,” he noted.
“Because of these, profit was cut from GHS67 million to GHS60 million. At a point, we were even getting up to GHS60 million. And if you are a managing director and your cash flow is taking a nosedive, nobody will tell you to take the decisive decision…” Dr. Braimah disclosed.
Dr Braimah further revealed that, he and the new GWCL Board decided to “extend the termination period in the contract [with SOFTribe] when they took office; “at first, it was three months but for the love of developing a Ghanaian company, we brought it to six months”.
“though GWCL had terminated the SOFTribe contract, we still paid them the actual monthly bill until the 6-months. But we are not anti-Ghanaian business following a tussle with local software developer SOFTtribe,” he assured.
He called on the media to properly investigate the issue and if any allegation of corruption or bribery emerged against any of the Directors, they should not hesitate to report to the appropriate anti-corruption agencies and desist from fabricated stories.
Dr Braimah was responding to a barrage of accusations leveled against GWCL after armed officials from National Security raided the offices of SOFTribe and seized electronic gadgets of the firm and its staff.
The reason for the confiscation of the items, according to officials, was to secure the billing software of GWCL, which, allegedly had been held to ransom by the IT firm after GWCL served notice that it intended ending a contractual agreement signed with the firm since 2016.
Source: Eric Nii Sackey || erysaco93@yahoo.com