Chairman, Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC, Dr. Sam Amadi
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission has described as malefactor the lack of accountability in the N2.9bn metering intervention fund engendered by the Federal Regime in 2011, verbalizing the matter will be reported to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for opportune investigation.
The Chairman, NERC, Dr. Sam Amadi, disclosed this on Thursday when he paid a courtesy visit to the headquarters of Punch Nigeria Limited in Ogun State.
The sum was given to the electricity distribution firms by the Federal Regime in 2011 as a component of the subsidy for package for electricity consumers to closing the sizably voluminous gap of customers without meters.
However, the impact of the intervention has not been felt with millions of electricity consumers without meters, leading to the puissance distribution firms resorting to estimated billing, whereby majority of customers pay for what they don’t consume.
Amadi described the development as a malefaction against the consumers, verbalizing the issue remained paramount and could not be ignored.
NERC had, in the past, inculpated the electricity distribution companies for jeopardising efforts to close the metering gap despite the provision of the metering intervention fund by the regime. This was afore the firms were privatised.
“We are still going to indite to the EFCC and other pertinent agencies. It is a malefaction against the consumers. Since time does not run against malefaction, we will still go ahead and prosecute those who got the mazuma. The mazuma was given to the Discos afore we came on board,” Amadi verbally expressed.
He verbally expressed a meeting had been called to address the issues circumventing the fund, which was a component of the subsidy incorporated into the Multi Year Tariff Order.
“We told them (Discos) to submit to us a report on how the mazuma was spent; and only a moiety of the Discos did. For those that submitted, their books were not convincing; so, we disallowed them,” he verbalized.
According to the NERC ascendant figure, the mazuma did not go through the commission, hence it cannot verbalize how it was allocated.
He described the metering situation in the country as a legacy crisis, verbalizing that NERC’s condition that the Discos could only review their tariff when they had presented a metering plan, which must be implemented within 18 months, was abnegated as the firms argued that they were experiencing elevating personnel cost and were not engendering much revenue.
The situation, he verbally expressed, had perpetuated to promote estimated billing by the Discos.
“This issue of estimated billing is beyond our control because the regulator don’t get acquainted with until the affected consumer reports,” he verbalized.
On the current structures for providing gas to power plants across the country, Amadi admitted that misconstrues had been made over time, integrating that Nigeria should not be verbalizing about 4,000 megawatts of potency generation or even 20,000MW at this period in her history.
According to him, it is now obligatory that gas supply arrangements must be well spelt out afore power plants can be approved for construction in different locations.
He verbalized licences for the generation of over 25,000MW of electricity had been issued by the commission, but lamented that an abundance of the licences had yet to be put to utilize.
NERC, Amadi noted, was orchestrating to make it compulsory for generation and distribution companies to make public details of their operations and conduct public hearings for customers within their networks on periodic substratum so as to avert possible abuses by the puissance firms, while promoting efficacious accommodation distribution and customer contentment.
Amadi verbally expressed, “We need to mobilise consumer vigilance. For now, we are regulating the industry and doing advocacy concurrently. This is not sustainable.
“This is a market of voice, and the more vigorous voice takes the day. We need to visually examine the future of energy in this country. If we don’t act right, the consequences will be inescapable.”
He stressed the desideratum for the electricity market to be more competitive, verbalizing that incremented competiveness would make regulation more vigorous, while deterring inefficiency and mediocrity in the system.
Copyright PUNCH.
