21 March 2014, Abuja – Abuja Electricity Distribution Company has unveiled plans to provide adequate power supply and improved level of services to its customers in Abuja, Niger, Nassarawa and Kogi States.
The company said in a statement on Wednesday that the plans were part of the strategies to confront its current problems of low load allocation from the transmission sector, vandalism of its network and poor state of electrical infrastructures.
According to the company, as part of the strategy of ensuring adequate and quality power supply to esteemed customers, it has embarked on programmes to replace faulty equipment and to re-inforce the network.
In line with this, the company said it had recently procured hundreds of transformers and supporting equipments and materials such as feeder pillars, aluminium conductors, overhead line accessories, underground cables, and cable accessories.
“These transformers are presently being installed in Abuja, Kogi, Niger and Nassarawa states to address faults and overloaded circuits,” the company added.
In addition to this, the company said it had scaled up maintenance on its network in in order to improve their performance.
It said in the last three months, it had re-enforced and increased the capacity of the network through implementation of deliberate projects.
The company also disclosed that it had upgraded the injection substations Lokoja and Sueija, adding that in the next few weeks, it will conclude the re-inforcement work that will improve power supply in Apo, Karu, Gwagwalada, Kuje, Lugbe and its environs.
“These improvements will enable more customers who until now had no opportunity of connecting to our network to access electricity, thereby improving their quality of life. With regards to our customer service strategy, we have enhanced customer complaint management process through our varoius walk in customer care centers which located throughout our business unit in our catchment area. in addition we are in the process of establishing a 24 hour call center to provide our customers easy access to us,” the statement added.
The company had also embarked on an exercise of modernising its vending system for prepayment meters in order to create several payment mechanisms such as cellphone vending, scratch cards, internet vending and payments through banks and points of sale (pos) as way of bringing payment convenience to the door steps of its customers.
“As we strive to ensure that our customers’ expectations are fullfiled, we use this medium to appeal to our customers to be watchful and report any act of vandalism to security agencies nearest to them. Acts of vandalism hampers our efforts in providing an improved supply to our customers,” the company said.
The company also restated its commitment to its mission which is to be world class electricity company through provision of quality and reliable electricty supply to customers and urged its customers to pay their bills promptly.
– Ejiofor Alike, This Day