Oscarline Onwuemenyi
30 March 2016, Sweetcrude, Abuja – The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, said it had issued a notice to the 11 Distribution companies (Discos) to furnish information of the metered customers for validation.
The acting Chairman of NERC, Dr. Anthony Akah in an interview said the Commission has sent a notice on that to the Discos and would expect them to provide details of customers being metered in one month.
He said, “We just sent them the notice, so we expect that they will start taking effect within a month. We are monitoring them and we also enjoin them to give us complete names, addresses and phone numbers of the people they said they metered so that the commission can run a spot random check to be sure that you actually metered.”
NERC had said that the Discos should publish a schedule of those whom they would meter to enable the public keep track of metered customers in the wake of a hiked tariff from February 2016.
Akah said the Discos have been told to provide accurate data noting that “whether it is 10,000 meters or 20,000 they install, we are taking it is very serious and that the issue of giving the commission deliberate wrong information is a criminal offence and it is something we cannot take lightly.”
The Discos it was learnt have initiated steps towards customers metering after most of them committed to metering about 100,000 customers annually taking effect this year.
Meanwhile, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) said it is looking for vendors for meter installation. In a publication this week, Abuja Disco said it has 400,000 customers connected to its network of which 50% (200,000) are unmetered customers.