The 2007 Meter Reading, Cash Collections and Credit Management regulation enacted by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) was created to enable power distribution companies (DisCos) bill a customer when they are unable to gain access to such a customer’s premises. Now it is the only way DisCos want to bill anyone and the regulator barks when sanctions should suffice.
Five years after power assets were handed over to core investors, estimated billing is now the most vexing issue in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI), representing 53 percent of all customer complaints in the last quarter of 2018, and leading the regulator to create a separate regulation to deal with the menace.
According to the 2007 meter reading regulation, if a DisCo’s staff is denied access to a customer’s premises, the staff is empowered to estimate the customer’s usage for the period and read the meter at a later date or allow the customer provide the reading. It is illegal to bill a customer who has no meter and DisCos were prohibited from artificially inflating the estimated usage of a customer.
In a flagrant abuse of this regulation, however, DisCos continue to inflict outrageous electricity bills on long-suffering Nigerian consumers and NERC, even though admitting that billing customers by guesswork amounts to corruption, has been unable to end the practice.
“What obtains now is that a lot of new and existing customers are connected to electricity supply without a meter,” John Momoh, NERC’s chairman, said in the organisation’s January monthly newsletter published on its website.
“Customers whose meters become faulty are also not replaced. Both categories of customers are then charged monthly ‘Estimated Billings’,” Momoh said.
Momoh further said there were many complaints that unmetered customers were issued estimated bills of monthly consumption with no clear scientific basis on how the billed amount was computed.
“Where a customer is billed on guesswork, elements of corruption are introduced,” he said.
NERC was forced to introduce what it called a scientific methodology to estimate consumption in instances where there are no meters, which basically involved requiring DisCos to measure electricity supply at distribution transformers so that consumption in a particular location can be ascertained.
“The DisCos failed to do distribution transformer metering which the methodology was heavily dependent on for fairness, hence the source of inaccuracy in estimated billing,” Momoh said.
Unable to compel the DisCos to fulfil the requirements of their contracts, largely because it had failed to allow market price for electricity consumed, thereby creating an illiquid market, NERC proposed a Meter Asset Provider Regulation, which allows third-party financiers to provide meter for a fee to consumers.
As at December 2018, a total of 115 firms were granted ‘No Objections’ by the Commission to participate in the DisCos’ procurement process and were free to quote their cost of providing metering services.
According to Momoh, the Commission is currently reviewing the procurement process in the DisCos having appointed Tender Auditors to audit the DisCos and ensure that the MAPs appointed can deliver. The DisCos’ lacklustre response to the regulation could see its premature end.
NERC has provided that customers handed crazy bills should pay the last bill they are comfortable with and then make a formal complaint to their DisCo to be resolved in 15 days.
“Where this is not done or the customer is unsatisfied with the resolution by the DisCo, they may escalate the matter to the NERC Forum office. This is an independent avenue for the customer to seek redress,” Momoh said.
When these fail, the Commission expects customers to complain to it. But these steps rarely resolve much in reality and are fraught with frustration.
“I have written and complained more than a dozen times,” said Chris Akor, a customer whose bill rose from N4,000 to N38,000 even with deplorable power supply around Ajah area of Lagos under Eko DisCo management, where he resides. “The next step now is to institute a legal action.”
Some customers of various DisCos told BusinessDay that their concerns were only resolved when they took the matter to court.
DisCos, wary of legal pronouncements that could serve as precedent, like the 2015 judgment by a Lagos court barring NERC from raising tariff, have been forced to settle out of court, compelling parties to keep the settlement private. In one suit, a frivolous bill worth over N500,000 was cancelled, BusinessDay learnt.
ISAAC ANYAOGU
