How Power Discos Continue to Fail Consumers
A review of six quarterly regulatory reports on activities in Nigeria’s electricity market has shown that electricity consumers still get the short end of the stick from their Discos, Chineme Okafor reports.
However, the reports showed that the NERC, the regulator of the market, repeatedly failed to take sufficient regulatory actions to address these failings. It also had series of unresolved complaints which customers lodged at its 30 forum offices located in 29 states of Nigeria.According to the NERC report, 52.80 per cent of the complaints lodged by consumers in the second quarter of 2019, were on metering and billing and 47 per cent in the last quarter of 2018.
With regards to the increase in metered customers, it explained that it, “is mainly attributed to the roll-out of meters under the Meter Asser Provider scheme,” adding that while some Discos have just finalised their procurement processes for MAPs, few of them have actually started metering under the scheme.
“The number of complaints on metering and billing decreased significantly during the quarter under review but still dominates the customer complaints. Metering and billing accounted for 52.80 per cent of the total complaints received during the second quarter of 2019 as against 60.96 per cent recorded in the first quarter of 2019.
“This implies that, on average, 693 customers complained about metering and billing per day in the fourth quarter of 2018. Another issue of serious concern is service interruption, accounting for 17.3 per cent of the total customer complaints received during the quarter under review,” it explained.
According to the report, 37 people died while 18 were injured in Q2-2019, while 10 deaths and seven injuries were recorded in Q1-2019.Somewhat throwing its hands in the air, the regulator said in the report that it has set up regulatory mechanisms to address the situation, but these have from the same report yielded no tangible results.
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