BREAKING NEWS, Power
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Babatunde Fashola, minister of power, works and housing orders Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission to stop its alternative metering scheme programme in the country
| By Anayo Ezugwu | May 9, 2016 @ 01:00 GMT |
WITH continuous complaint over non-metering of electricity consumers in Nigeria, Babatunde Fashola, minister of power, works and housing, has directed the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, to immediately wind down its alternative metering scheme, the Credited Advance Payment for Metering Initiative, CAPMI. The minister cited instances of contractual distrust between electricity consumers and the electricity distribution companies, Discos, in the country.
Fashola said the scheme must be stopped because the Discos that collected money from their customers to procure and install meters at their homes have mostly failed to do so. Fashola, in a statement from Hakeem Bello, his media aide, identified the CAPMI as one of the customer service challenges that he needed to resolve immediately. He said, “You cannot take peoples’ money without providing the service for which they have paid. I was uncomfortable with that.”
The minister then said the ministry of power had ordered that the scheme be wound down so that people could get what they have paid for, saying it is the responsibility of the Discos to provide meters for their consumers. “We must bring mutual trust in the provision of power and those are some of the emerging issues again and if people have paid for something they deserve to have it and if you can’t do it wind down the scheme.
“Let’s hold you now fully responsible, you have a market tariff, you go and meter. All of these things are happening at our monthly meetings and we are also holding the Discos now to their committed timelines for metering and we are also asking them to file returns. We ask them ‘who have you metered? We want to see the details if you tell us you have metered any area.
“This will be an ongoing exercise until we finish, we also need to be fair because if since 1960 that we started public power and we have not metered everybody when our population was not as much as this, do we honestly think this can happen in five months? But ultimately this will happen because there is a business end to it and for those who are bringing in the meters they also need to bring in high quality meters because they have a duty to protect both the consumers and the Discos.”
The CAPMI was introduced by NERC in 2014 to help Discos bridge extant gap in electricity meters amongst its consumers. It was planned to help unmetered consumers who could afford new meters, advance funds to the Discos to install meters at their homes and then get rebates in form of electricity units from the Discos.
The CAPMI was introduced by NERC in 2014, to help Discos bridge extant gap in electricity meters amongst its consumers. It was planned to help unmetered consumers who could afford new meters, advance funds to the Discos to install meters at their homes and then get rebates in form of electricity units from the Discos.
The NERC had on April 20, stated that the Discos are yet to meter more than 2.9 million electricity consumers. The commission in a report presented during a meeting with the power firms to evaluate their performance on the CAPMI, said the Discos had performed poorly in terms of metering their customers.
The commission noted that as of the time of privatising the industry in November 2013, the Discos reached an agreement with the Bureau of Public Enterprises, BPE, and NERC to bridge the three million metering gap but had failed to meter 200,000 consumers since then. The report showed that of the 403,255 meters procured since 2013, customers financed the installation of 251,531, which were about 100,000 higher than what the Discos had procured as of March 2016.
According to NERC, data submitted by the Discos indicated that there were about 6.2 million customer accounts as of December 2015, while about 3.2 million were metered. It stated that about three million customers had remained unmetered a development that it said raised concerns on the estimated billing measures adopted by the Discos.
The report stated that the distribution firms in the northern part of the country, including Abuja, Jos, Kaduna, Kano and Yola, claimed to have a customer base of 1.973 million, while Port Harcourt, Benin and Enugu Discos had 1,863,708 customers. It added that in the West, Eko, Ikeja and Ibadan Discos revealed that they had 2,322,376 customer accounts. It explained that the Nigerian electricity supply industry, with 6,159,775 customer accounts, had barely only 3,206,599 metered customers, meaning that the country has a metering gap of more than 47 percent or 2,953,176 customers.
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