Mass metering: Senate says performance of NERC falls below budgetary provision

The Senate Committee on Power on Thursday passed a damning verdict on the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) on the mass metering project in the country, saying the performance of NERC falls below budgetary provision.

The lawmakers said despite the N33.4 billion already released by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), the expectations of Nigerians have not been met.

Senator representing Benue North East and Chairman, Gabriel Suswam, said the essence of intervention made by the federal government has not been achieved.

He said: “Your performance report on the mass metering project is not impressive and encouraging at all.

“Nigerians are not happy that with all efforts being made by the federal government to get electricity consumption metered, these efforts are being thwarted in one way or the other.

“Estimated billings is not acceptable and that is the reason why the intervention was made.

“In the light of this, this committee will want your commission and the DISCOs to appear before it again by the end of next month, to see whether the assurance given on better performance will be done or not.”

Earlier in his presentation, the NERC Chairman, Engineer Sanusi Garba, said it has only recorded 13% implementation as of March 19, 2021.

He further disclosed that while 403,000 out of the targeted one million meters have been delivered to the various DISCOs, only 127,000 have been installed, representing 13% performance.”

Engineer Garba attributed the poor performance to the delay in disbursement of the fund, as he noted that the chunk of the intervention fund was made available last February.

“Target performance duration for the project which is phase one, entailing metering of one million houses across the country in reducing the metering deficit of 6.5 million, is six months, that is from October 2020 to April 2021.

“Though out of the N59.2 billion earmarked for it, N33.4 billion has been released to the various DISCOs by the Central Bank of Nigeria but disbursement of the releases were very slow which resulted in many of them, accessing the fund in February.

“This largely contributed to the poor performance percentage by the DISCOs for now, on the National Mass Metering project.

“But with a chunk of the funds available to the DISCOs now, the implementation performance index will rise astronomically within the next few weeks,” he said.

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