IBEDC, NERC hold town hall meeting, to meter 4 million Nigerians under NMMP phase 1

The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has revealed plans by the commission to ensure the metering of four million Nigerians in a few years under the phase 1 of the National Mass Metering Programme (NMMP) of the Federal Government.

The Commissioner, Consumer Affairs, NERC, Aisha Mahmud, said this at the customer complaints resolution meeting organised by NERC which took place on Tuesday, November 15, 2022, at Jogor Event Centre, Ibadan.

In her opening remarks, Mahmud said the three-day town hall meeting was convened to educate electricity consumers within IBEDC franchise of their rights and obligations, and resolve customers’ complaints as a regulator and added that the Commission has established 31 forum offices across the country for the purpose of resolving electricity consumers’ complaints.

While noting that the challenge of metering has been a recurring complaint from electricity consumers, Mahmud said the issue would soon be resolved considering the number of years Nigeria has come as regards metering.

“We have over the years tried to come up with various initiatives just to see that Nigerians are metered. We came up with CAPMI (Credited Advance Payment for Metering Initiative) in 2013 under which about 480,000 Nigerians were metered, under MAP (Meter Asset Provider), about 580,000 Nigerians were metered, under the National Mass Metering Programme which we know that phase zero was sponsored by the government and it was loaned to the Distribution Companies, the target was to meter one million customers and almost one million customers were metered.

“We are in the process of phase one of the National Mass Metering Programme and the target is four million meters in the next couple of months. Within the next one to two years, I am sure we will get more than four million Nigerians metered.”

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On the issue of epileptic power supply, Mahmud said, “In Nigeria, electricity generation started as far back as 1896 and 126 years down the line we are still talking about 5,000 megawatts of available generation. For me, we should be many steps away from that or maybe we should be generating 20,000 megawatts as at today and not 5,000 megawatts that we are still talking about even though we have an installed capacity of 13,000 megawatts but only a fraction of that gets to the end-users.

“As a Commission, we are doing our best to see that we increase generation and part of what we have done is partial activation of contracts. Before the partial activation of contracts, we had only five active PPAs in the industry – Azura, Olorunsogo, Omotosho, Shell and AGIP – but we decided to activate more contracts so that at least we can hold generators, TCN and the DISCOs accountable to service improvement and those that are not performing will be held accountable to non-performance.”

The interim Managing Director, IBEDC, Mr Kingsley Achife, while lending credence to the challenge of power generation that has hampered adequate power distribution, said, “What we need to serve our community and serve them better is about 20,000 megawatts but what we are getting from the grid is less than 400 megawatts everyday. How do we share it so that people that need 20,000 megawatts can make do with 430 megawatts? There are going to be a lot of complaints because the amount we have is too small.”

“There are infrastructural issues, there are investment issues and other kinds of things. We have developed a suite of solutions which we are applying. We have started embedded generation and we have gotten a number of partners who we are going through a process with to understand their capacity, where they can best serve us and where we can place them.”

Mr Achife also bemoaned the challenge of power theft, meter bypass, staff harassment and power infrastructure vandalism and called on the community members at the town hall meeting to help the Company enlighten other members of their communities on the dangers of these.

The meeting featured presentations from NERC and IBEDC on customer rights and obligations, trends of consumer complaints in Ibadan, end-user tariffs for IBEDC, metering and others.

During the meeting, participants’ questions on metering, billing, power supply, power sector investment, etc were answered by the managements of NERC and IBEDC

Others present at the meeting include the General Manager, NERC, Dr Usman Abba Arabi; Director, National Orientation Agency, Dr Kayode Odedokun; HOD, Consumer Affairs, NERC, Dr Shittu Shaibu; Chief Commercial Officer, IBEDC, Mr Deolu Ijose; the Bala Balogun of Ibadanland, Chief Abiola Arulogun; among others.