Civil Liberties Organisation (CLO) has condemned ‘crazy and outrageous’ billing by most electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos) in Nigeria.
The CLO called on DisCos to adhere strictly to the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) directive on estimated billing.
Electricity consumers have continued to suffer extortion from the inefficient electricity distribution companies in Nigeria.
With a view to ending this problem, President Muhammadu Buhari, in August 2020, ordered the establishment of a nationwide mass-metering programme to meet the 6.5 million deficits of meters nationwide.
Paying for electricity in advance helps ensure that consumers do not get into debt with the energy supplier, while the supplier does not fleece them with arbitrary estimates.
In line with the president’s directive, the Presidential Mass Metering Initiative had made funds available for the first phase of distributing 1,000,000 meters to Nigerians through DisCos.
However, the first phase of the initiative only distributed meters in parts of Kano, Kaduna, Lagos, and Abuja.
NERC had in February 2020 issued new guidelines for computing fees of unmetered electricity consumers.
It stated that DisCos should not charge customers who do not consume more than 50kWhr of electricity in a month more than N2,000 per month.
‘CLO condemns crazy and outrageous billing by most electricity DisCos in the country’, News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) quoted the Chairman of CLO, Anambra, Vincent Ezekwueme, as saying.
‘We call on DisCos to strictly adhere to NERC directive that estimated bills should not exceed N2,000 per month.
‘Or in the alternative, DisCos should transparently distribute free prepaid metres to consumers’.
Ezekwueme also pleaded with the government and civil society organisations (CSOs) to work assiduously towards protecting rights of citizens and reducing cost of governance.
Nigeria’s House of Representatives had promoted a bill, Electricity Power Reform Act (Amendment Bill) 2018, to criminalise estimated billing, which relies essentially on conjectures and randomness.
Source: News Agency of Nigeria
Photo source: AEDC
