Eko Disco to roll out 360,000 electricity meters

Customers of Eko Electricity Distribution Company who are presently being billed without meters in their premises may soon have cause to smile going by the words of Oladele Amoda, the managing director of the company.

Amoda, who was speaking with journalists shortly after the oversight visit of the Senate Committee on Privatisation and Commercialisation to the company on Monday, said the company had concluded plans to roll out a total of 360,000 electricity meters to customers under the distribution network of the company.

According to the Eko Disco boss, N1.3 billion would be expended on the project by the company. The first phase of the project, he disclosed, would start with about 5,000 meters for all high voltage or maximum demand customers of the company who, he said, were responsible for about 70 percent of the company’s revenue profile.

He further said under the scheme, apart from those not having meters at all, all customers having obsolete and malfunctioning meters would also have their meters replaced.

Earlier on in his post-privatisation update report to the committee, he had disclosed that the company had embarked on a number of measures poised to engender a total turn-around in the company’s services to its customers. These, he said, included the embedded generation project, evolvement of a new human resource policy with emphasis on workers’ safety, training and improvement of general working condition.

Another sum of N2.3 billion would be spent on network rehabilitation, system upgrade and reinforcement with a view to drastically reducing equipment downtime and enhancing customer satisfaction and service delivery.

Responding, Gbenga Obadara, chairman of the Senate Committee, said the Senate would always be ready to work with the newly privatised electricity distribution companies and other stakeholders in the electricity sector for the purpose of jointly finding a lasting solution to the problems militating against regular power supply in the country.

Also speaking, a director of the company, Tunji Olowolafe said customer satisfaction, rather than profit making, had always been the main focus of the company, saying the new owners believed that the customer needed to be satisfied first so that he can pay for service rendered. Olowolafe said $150 million out of the $250 million the company planned to invest on the improvement of its services to customers had been secured. The impact of this, he said, on the general service delivery of the company would be manifest for all to see soon, as the company had started employing the best available technology in all areas of its operations.

Olusola Bello