2.9 Million Power Consumers Still Unmetered in Nigeria – NERC

Fri, Apr 22, 2016
By publisher
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Power

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The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission says that 2.9 million Nigerians are yet to be given electricity meter since the privatisation of the power sector in 2013

By Anayo Ezugwu  |  May 2, 2016 @ 01:00 GMT  |

ELECTRICITY distribution companies, Discos, in Nigeria are yet to meter more than 2.9 million electricity consumers more than two years after the privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria. The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, in a report presented in Abuja, on Wednesday, April 20, during a meeting with the power firms to evaluate their performance on the Credited Advance Payment for Metering Initiative, said the 11 distribution firms 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.

In his address, Anthony Akah, acting chairman, NERC, explained that the Nigerian electricity supply industry, with 6,159,775 customer accounts, had barely only 3,206,599 metered customers. He said the sector had a metering gap of more than 47 per cent or 2,953,176 customers.

Akah stated that the report showed that the electricity distribution companies as of March 2016 had collectively metered just 403,255 customers since they took over. Expressing disappointment with the performance of the Discos, the NERC boss said, “In line with the policy trust of the ministry of power, we will work on progressive wind down of the CAPMI scheme. As NERC, we are going beyond our regulatory landscape because you have not embraced the scheme as it should.

“People are complaining of being unfairly billed; they are not questioning the tariff as much as the fact that there is no noticeable improvement in supply. We believe we have done what is closest to a reflective tariff. We are being challenged; now, there is no going back on our protection of the consumers; we are stepping up our enforcement. It is grossly unfair. We are working on a massive monitoring. We will ask for names of people who have paid but have yet to be metered.”

Other concerns raised by the NERC boss included the wrong migration of customers to higher classes of tariffs and complaints of over 200 percent rise in the estimated bills of some consumers. NERC condemned the reports submitted by the Ikeja and Kano Discos, as they stated that their over one million customers were unwilling to pay for meters under the CAPMI scheme.

The Abuja and Jos Discos had recently announced that they would roll out meters from May. While the Jos Disco said it would roll out 180,000 meters, Abuja announced that it was planning 100,000.

In defence of its metering scheme, the Jos Disco contested its status, saying it had done more than the figure captured in the report. Benin Disco said it used cluster billing to charge consumers in a place for the energy delivered to that area, whether household entities consumed power in the location or not.

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