The government’s much-touted turnaround at the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) is coming under scrutiny, with data and policy analyst Alfred Appiah questioning whether the company’s own financial statements and other key performance indicators support the scale of improvement being portrayed.
Alfred Appiah’s analysis is particularly significant because the government’s narrative of a dramatic improvement at ECG is now being cited by the company’s workers’ union in its opposition to private sector participation.
The argument from the union is that if ECG has already undergone such a significant turnaround, why bring in private-sector management?
But according to Appiah, the underlying numbers tell a much less impressive story relative to the government’s massive turnaround narrative.
Revenue Growth
The Finance Minister has said ECG’s monthly revenue increased from about GH¢900 million in 2024 to GH¢1.7 billion, implying almost a 90% increase.
Alfred Appiah, however, argues that this comparison does not accurately represent ECG’s underlying revenue performance. According to his analysis, ECG’s 2024 financial statements show average monthly revenue from electricity sales of about GH¢1.5 billion. In 2025, the average was approximately GH¢1.7 billion.
This means the actual increase in electricity-sales revenue was closer to 13%, rather than 90%.
For the analyst, the difference matters. What was presented as a dramatic increase in revenue appears to have been influenced significantly by improved compliance with the cash waterfall mechanism rather than a comparable transformation in ECG’s underlying ability to generate and collect revenue. In other words, the headline number may be improving faster than the business itself.
The Question of Operating Loss
Alfred Appiah further argues that ECG’s financial statements also raise questions about how far the turnaround has gone. Excluding government grants, he says ECG recorded an operating loss of about GH¢15.2 billion in 2024, which narrowed only slightly to approximately GH¢14.3 billion in 2025.
This is an improvement of roughly GH¢900 million, but it hardly represents a financial transformation for a company still losing more than GH¢14 billion from its operations.
He further argues that the much smaller loss figure mentioned by the State Interests and Governance Authority (SIGA) is partly affected by unrealised foreign-exchange gains.
He notes that the distinction is important because business does not necessarily become financially healthy simply because its reported accounting position improves. What matters is whether its core operations are becoming more efficient, whether it is reducing losses and whether it is collecting enough money from customers to cover the electricity it purchases.
Distribution Losses
ECG is still losing a quarter of the power it buys. One of the clearest tests of ECG’s operational efficiency is distribution loss, which is the proportion of electricity purchased that does not ultimately get billed to customers.
Energy Commission data show that distribution losses declined only marginally, from 27.1% in 2024 to 26.9% in 2025. This, he agrees, is a progress, but it is hardly a dramatic turnaround. At roughly 27%, ECG is still failing to monetise more than one-quarter of the electricity it purchases.
Revenue Collection
Alfred Appiah further notes that data Ghana shared with the World Bank show ECG’s collection efficiency at about 85% as of May 2026, compared with an 86% baseline in 2022.
The PURC target is 98%, meaning ECG is collecting only about 85 cedis for every GH¢100 worth of electricity it bills. When the collection rate is combined with distribution losses, the picture becomes even clearer.
Using the two indicators, Appiah estimates that ECG is effectively recovering only around GH¢62 for every GH¢100 worth of electricity it purchases, leaving approximately GH¢38 unrecovered.
At the 2022 baseline, the corresponding loss was about GH¢39. The improvement, therefore, is marginal. The numbers do not mean there has been no improvement. Alfred
Appiah’s analysis does not suggest ECG has made no progress. There has been an improvement in its financial position, revenue performance and some operational indicators. The question is whether that improvement is large enough to justify describing the company as having undergone a significant turnaround.
For Alfred Appiah, the government’s own positive messaging may now be working against it. By presenting ECG as having achieved a dramatic financial turnaround, government has given the workers’ union ammunition to ask why private-sector participation is necessary in the first place.
