About N13bn debt owed the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company, AEDC, by various agencies of government with inappropriate price regime are some of the concerns raised by the management of the company during an interactive session with members of the Federal House of Representatives who came for an oversight function to the company on Wednesday.
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Ernest Mupwaya, the Managing director of AEDC informed members of the House of Representative during the oversight that the company has invested over N19bn from 2014-2019 in the upgrade of electricity distribution infrastructure in a bid to deliver effective services to customers in its franchise areas of Nassarawa, Kogi, Niger and the Federal Capital Territory.
According to the Managing director, the AEDC is however still being hampered in its effective service delivery due largely to price differentiation without correspondent tariff increase as well as collection losses largely fueled by meter bypass, unmetered customers, technical losses which set back power delivery business.
Speaking further, he pointed out that the Meter Asset Provider initiative by the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission is a wonderful initiative but hampered by high port duty of a journey 45 percent while urging the representatives to reconsider possible waiver imported meters under the scheme to close the metering gap.
He said, “So far we have installed 54,748 meters under the MAP initiative but could have been higher to 100 per cent of there is a waiver for the import as many meters are stuck in the Port because of the policy.
He states further that if the import duty has been removed, closing metering access could have been faster and would have impacted positively in addressing liquidity concerns ravaging the sector.
In his response Timilehin Adelegbe, the Chairman House Committee on Privatisation and commercialisation told the AEDC management that their concerns would be thoroughly looked into as he requested for documented evidence of the complaints they have made to the regulator-NERC
He noted that the power sector must be able to deliver the proposed benefits to Nigerians amidst concerns of epileptical power supply to Nigerians with the generation companies recently even threatening to shut down, due largely to liquidity concerns.
