The government’s attempts to digitalize revenue collection were thwarted, according to Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, the vice president and flagbearer of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), by representatives of the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG).
The Vice President has been spearheading the Akufo-Addo administration’s digitalization initiative.
Dr. Bawumia said at the Annual AGM of Anti-Corruption Agencies in Africa that certain ECG IT unit employees had installed ransomware to stop the system from functioning correctly.
He said that the ransomware caused the system to crash, and that national security had to step in to identify the employees responsible for the damage.
“Every month, they simply maintained it at GHC450 million.” I thus indicated that we needed to deploy a team to digitalize the Electricity Company of Ghana’s new collection. As a result, we sent a team and started the digitalization process.
Can you believe that system employees installed ransomware throughout the entire system to ruin it? And that’s when the system fell apart. In the end, we had to call in national security to determine that some employees of the IT department were responsible.
And we located the machine on which the ransomware had been introduced into the network. Restoring the system takes some time. To make this work at all, they demanded a ransom. Is that even possible to imagine?
So, they were taken into custody. We also digitalized the system, restored it, and said that Ghana would no longer accept cash payments for electricity. You solely use electronic bank transfers and mobile money to make payments. That is presently the situation. Is it not astonishing that monthly receipts have increased to more over one billion cedis from GHC 450 million?