Nigerians were suffering greatly when the defunct National Electric Power Authority, NEPA, was a monopoly in control of public power supply. NEPA concentrated on the supply of blackout, which paralysed the Nigerian manufacturing sector. The government eventually summoned the political will to unbundled NEPA by splitting it along the lines of its primary responsibilities: generation, transmission and distribution.
Under the Electric Power Reform Act, government reserved for itself interstate transmission of electricity across the country given the strategic importance of this and the attendant challenges which private sector organizations waould face in securing multiple rights-of-way from various state governments. The federal government wisely foresaw that it could ease the problem by deploying its might and extant laws.
The unbundled NEPA created opportunities for investors in the generation and distribution ends of the power supply spectrum. Different service territories were carved out and sold off to distribution companies, owned by private investors.
However rather than get value for money paid, Nigerians have been dancing to the painful DISCO music of the distribution companies, who have continued to punish the people with estimated bills, a terrible rampant practice carried over from the era of NEPA. Evidently, the leopard cannot change its spots or the tiger lose its stripes.
It is quite clear that the DISCOs which are benefiting from estimated bills customers are forced to pay will never allow the full change over to pre-paid meters to succeed. The simple reason is that if a person loads a card of N5000, for instance, he will never buy fresh card until that one has been exhausted. Therefore, it is in the best interest of the DISCO to supply electricity to those customers, to enable them exhaust the credit in the card and then buy new ones. To achieve this, power supply is cut off from non-metered customers, who get estimated bills that they must pay, and then channeled to areas where the majority of the customers have prepaid meters.
It goes without saying that the DISCOs are sabotaging the efforts of the government to provide public power supply and also ripping of the citizenry. What is more troubling is that government has an offensive tendency to protect the generating companies (GENCOs) and the DISCOs, when the people complain about the abysmal power supply situation in the country. One day, the people will rise up against the DISCos in a violent manner. A stitch in time, it said, saves nine.
► Angry Jane wrote via [email protected]
