IBEDC seeks review of electricity tariff for optimum performance

The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC) has submitted a tariff review proposal of between 25 percent and 30 percent to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), which it said will help it achieve optimum performance.

This is as the electricity distribution company (Disco) has assured that once there is enough supply coupled with improvement in the company’s electrical facilities, customers in the area would enjoy at least 15 hours regular power supply instead of the present 10 hours.

IBEDC franchise area comprises Oyo, Ogun, Osun, Ondo and parts of Kwara, Kogi and Niger states.

Fortunato Leynes, managing director of the company, who disclosed this in Ibadan said, “We have put forward a tariff review proposal to NERC because the tariff system now is not sufficient for us to recover all our investments and generate the funds needed to make service delivery efficient. For us to be efficient there must be a review of tariff by about 25 percent to 30 percent increase to make us viable”.

This means should the proposal scale through, customers will be expected to pay between N24 and N25 per kilowatts hour as against N18 and N19 per kilowatts hour for the energy charged currently.

Leynes, who spoke to newsmen after a knowledge sharing programme organised by the company entitled ‘Journey to Change’, said one of the greatest challenges facing the company in the last nine months when it was taken over was that there is no enough power generating capacity to distribute to customers as well as no enough revenue generation to support business operations and recover investment of owners that bought the company.

According to him, generating capacity should be at 5,000 megawatts, “but what we have when we took over was at the level of 4,000 megawatts and later it went down to 3,000 megawatts, but now it is hovering around 3,500 megawatts and 3,600 megawatts.”

The IBEDC boss also stated that the low generating capacity was due to the vandalism of gas pipelines and weakness in the transmission network.

On appraisal of the company in the last nine months, he said, “We are now buying electricity distribution materials like transformers, poles and conductors that will improve our distribution capacity. We are also buying metres so that our customers will be appropriately metered.

“Right now, we have this metre application which could be gotten through Credited Advance Payment for Metering

mplementation (CAPMI) scheme in which customers would make initial deposit and the company would refund the deposit over a period of 36 months with corresponding interest and within 45 days their metres are installed.”

John Darlington, the deputy managing director of IBEDC, said efforts are been made to give customers quality service delivery, saying the challenges are enormous.