So the past few days my power had finished and I’ve been meaning to go to the VRA(Volta River Authority) to load up. For those who don’t know, the VRA is basically light the company in charge of electricity and power stuff here.
I learnt something very new today over there and it kinda pissed me off I had to learn it today. I called up a delivery service to take me to town to handle some extra stuff and getting the power was the last thing on the list.
What I’m about to say might not make a lot of sense to you if you’re not Ghana or Africa. Okay so here goes…
You know how when you buy power (credit), you get some bonus as “reserve”? If you said yes or nodded your head in agreement, welcome to the group that learnt it actually doesn’t work that way today.
The VRA attendant told me the “reserve” credit we use after we run out of credit is not actually bonus that was given to you, but is a debt or loan credit you took. So something like taking a mobile money loan like Qwik Loan.
It was a long conversation trying to explain to an agent that’s not how it works. Yeah, me who doesn’t work there, trying to tell the professional how their job works. Lol fucking right.
I was honestly embarrassed I didn’t know about this all this time. I’ve gone to the VRA more times than I can count to buy prepaid and if I had just taken the time to properly look at the numbers on the prepaid receipt, I would understand this logistics.
This new lesson is just one part of the post. Why she was telling me about this was because apparently I had some "debt" on my card (which I didn’t know was debt until right about today) and I swore everything I didn’t. Eventually after she was done explaining everything, it turns out I need to pay a GHC28 service fee before I could even buy prepaid. Funny thing is that I brought GHC30 to buy my prepaid. So in essence, I only had enough money to pay off my service fee and go back home with no credit. Seeing as that was already my last coin, I told her I’d come back another time and left with my GHC30.
According to her, after paying this “service fee”, I would need to buy credit worth not less than 50cedis to be good, because the debt on my loan would equal close to 20cedis. Meaning I get only 30cedis credit myself.
Most of this stuff was pretty confusing to me, but I managed to make meaning out of some bits of it. Not sure whether everyone else knew this and I was the only moron, but my delivery guy said he knew about it when I asked it and it made me feel more stupid than I already seemed.
So yeah, this was the lesson for today. Did you already know these things or are you just finding out now too?
All images here are mine