EEDC has lost N32bn, spends N20bn on metering since it took over

Enugu Electricity Distribution Company EEDC has promised to make prepaid meters available to every home and organisation in the zone to solve the issues of outrageous bills.

The Managing Director of the company Steve Dike who gave the hint in an interactive section with Enugu coalition of Business and Professional Associations (ECOBPA) said the company has spent over N20 billion in metering since it took over form PHC and also have cumulative loss of about N32 billion.

Dike said EEDC had through away all the existing prepaid meters on discovery that all the existing meters have been compromised.

He said that they have decided to fix the meters on the poles to avoid repeat of what happened in the past “This time we are going to put our meters on pole, they are going to be smart meters in the sense that if you tamper with it electronically we will know that would also solve some of the problems that we have”. He said.

The managing Director and member of the Board said that the metering programme has started and that they are looking at two hundred thousand meters within the next one year.

“Every two months we are goning to have five thousand on ground so that they will be bringing in more as they go, because we do not want to have a lot of them on ground where they will beginning to miss”.

Dike said they have to take all the steps to ensure that meters are properly secured, because in Onitsha somebody took a meter to China and produced exactly the same meter with the same serial number but EEDC were lucky to discover it, saying that it is only in the south east that they have what they call clone meter and that was why they are bringing the meters in batches so that it will be monitored.

He said that they have to delay and start all over again when they discovered that 98 percent of meters in Awkunanaw where EEDC have the bulk, are by- passed and they are prepaid meters. ” so we have to stop our first contract, we have started our metering programme, we have awarded all the contracts for metering what we want to do is to start with all our commercial customers the high demand customers who are about 4600. But the shocker is that majority of the high customers, their integrity are questionable”. Dike said.
He told the business community that the present bill system was inherited from PHC and the system was hurriedly implemented in 2013 just before they took over and that part of it had corruption written all over it. “Because it was set up to service some corrupt customers so that it will be already inherent in the system so that even when we come we can not discover. So when we came in we started looking at the entire system and we found out that the integrity of the system was questionable”.