Termination of SOFTtribe contract to save Ghana millions of cedis – GWCL

The Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) has justified its decision to discontinue its contract with local IT firms, SOFTtribe Limited, ABC News can report.

According to GWCL, the termination of the contract was long overdue as SOFTtribe’s e-billing system was fraught with many challenges, leading to a drastic decline in the company’s revenue targets.

The GWCL and the SOFTtribe have been embroiled in a tussle following a decision by the former to terminate a contract it had with the IT firm in September this year.

While SOFTtribe believes that the decision to terminate the contract was unfair, Ghana Water Company Limited insists the action was in the right direction.

At a press conference in Accra Thursday, the Managing Director of GWCL, Dr. Clifford Braimah explained that the termination of its contract with SOFTtribe was in the national interest as the IT firm persistently failed to rectify the challenges that characterized the billing system.

Dr. Braimah added that GWCL lost millions in revenue due to incidence like billing with wrong tariffs and disparities between water bills.

“It was established that GWCL’s e-billing system was fraught with a lot of disparities and complaints from customers, staff and the early users of the software. There are a lot of people who say they didn’t consume that much but were given so much bill. When customers begin to complain about the measurement of their consumption and they are not satisfied, demand is going to slow down, willingness to pay is also going to slow down. It was established that the e-billing solution had some undefined scope and that it was still under development,” Dr. Clifford Braimah said.

“GWCL will have to evaluate the risk and take a decisive decision before customers begin agitating over inaccurate bills and to also prevent some personnel of the company to take advantage of the situation to cash in… Nobody can say that GWCL is anti-Ghanaian business. It is not. The fact is that, the interest of me as a Managing Director is to protect the citizens of Ghana and if I am to protect the citizens of Ghana, I will use every legitimate means to do that,” he added.

National Security Operatives conducted an operation Monday to secure databases belonging to the Ghana Water Company Limited (GWCL) from SOFTtribe Ltd over some contractual issues between the two companies.

Reports indicated that personnel from the National Security raided the offices of SOFTtribe Ltd in Accra Monday to safeguard the database of the GWCL following a complaint by the company that accesses to its database had been deliberately blocked by the IT firm.

According to National Security Sources, Softtribe Ltd was holding the databases, which are critical for billing customers, to ransom after GWCL served to notice it will not renew its contractual agreement with the IT firm.

The contract between SOFTtribe and the Ghana Water Company was reportedly terminated in September 2019 after GWCL issued a letter of termination to the IT Firm.

Source: abcnewsgh.com