SALIU Adekunle’s day starts and ends in a sputter of smoke. His generator’s loud hiss and steel clang mix with fume to signal the commencement of work and his departure from his steel forge, everyday. The factory, carved from his backyard, doubles as an apprenticeship workshop behind his two-bedroom bungalow.
The welder has learnt to put his trust in alternative power supply; due to persistent power failure and an outrageous estimated billing system by the Ikeja Electric Distribution Company (IKEDC), Adekunle acquired two big generators to power his implements.
“I spend approximately N6, 000 on generator fuel everyday. One runs on diesel and the other runs on petrol. Yet at the end of the month, IKEDC brings me a bill of N42, 000. I wonder how they arrive at such figure. Initially, the billing ranged at N5, 000 every month and I protested it even at that figure. IKEDC officials urged me to pay at least N2, 000 every month, claiming that they would be okay with me and they won’t cut off my power supply. And I complied.
“But few months ago, my bill went up from N5, 000 to N12, 000 and then N31, 000. It is currently estimated at N42, 000. I complained bitterly to them but they argued that since electricity supply had improved, so had the billing. When I refused to pay, they came to cut and cart away my cable.
“They give us electricity for approximately four hours everyday, and it’s never at a stretch. Even so, IKEDC staff claim we have light for seven hours…I have given up on ever enjoying electricity supply. They can eat my cable,” said Adekunle.
Among other things, Adekunle is unaware that running a mini-factory from his home amounts to electricity theft by regulatory standards, given the residential classification of his home.
Also, IKEDC has no right to cut and cart off his electricity cable. This is because the cables were part of the infrastructure the Distribution Company (DISCO) inherited following the privatisation of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).
“I built my house on the outskirts of Lagos; there, most of the electricity cables and polls were acquired via communal pooling of financial and human resources. They were paid for by residents of communities. All the defunct PHCN staff come to do was to install the polls and connect the cables. As a community, we have bought cables, polls and transformers. The sad thing is that we do not enjoy the electricity for which we acquired the infrastructure. Nobody reimburses us.
“Yet, the new DISCO staff come around to cut and cart off cables we both with our own money, for electricity they have failed to provide at satisfactory level. Yet the billing gets crazier,” argued Idris Abooaba.
IKEDC vs Ijaiye-Ojokoro
The Nation findings in Ijaiye- Ojokoro, Lagos, revealed that IKEDC initially issued a uniform rate of between N4, 000 and N5, 000 to residents of the area. Subsequently, the company increased it to N10, 000 and then N17, 000. The residents, however, lost their cool when IKEDC increased the billing from N17, 000 to N75, 000 for a 10-room single apartment.
Narrating her ordeal with the distribution company, Augustina Okangbe stated that, “Earlier, residents paid N20, 000 as estimated monthly electricity charge for a three-bedroom flat, but that was when the light was stable.
“But around January/February 2019, IKEDC staff visited the area to say that they were calculating our electricity bill with a new meter. Consequently, they started bringing crazy bills to our area. With the crazy billing, my electricity charge went up to N4, 000-plus from the initial N1, 500. That was more than my N3, 500 shop rent. We complained about it and IKEDC suggested that to reduce the charges, they will reduce the hours in which they gave us light.
“We agreed that they should reduce the hours to between eight and 12 hours per day, to make the bills more affordable to us. After a month, the hours in which we had light reduced drastically and the bills got crazier. We paid more than we were using before.”
Corroborating her, Idayat Oguntuase stated that she uses just one chest freezer, a 14-inches TV and one bulb in her two-bedroom apartment but her bill went up from N18, 000 per month to N28, 000 within the period. “Electricity is calculated by the company at N27 per unit. It beats us how they arrive at the outrageous bills foisted on us,” she said.
Lolade Soleye, a hairdresser and resident of the area, stated that her shop rent is more than her house rent. According to her, she pays N2, 500 as house rent and N5, 000 as monthly electricity charge for her small shop.” Due to the constraints imposed upon them, residents protested the anomally, refusing to pay what they termed as “crazy bill.” In response, IKEDC cut off their power supply for three weeks to punish them. The residents subsequently took to the streets in protest; they took their complaint to a broadcast medium in Alagbado.
They also visited IKEDC management in Ikeja. The latter sued for peace and directed that the area office in Ijaiye-Ojokoro to restore electricity in the area. But even after serving our three-week electricity blackout as punishment, IKEDC still issued the same crazy bill to us. For instance, I was recently given a bill of N10, 000 for the three weeks of power outage,” said Soleye. “We want prepaid meters to be installed in our communities. We do not want the estimated billing anymore,” she said. In Ilupeju area of Lagos, Opeyemi O, an occupant of a two-bedroom flat with meter number 05-5126163701 (now 0100700178) on Association Avenue, complained bitterly of a raw deal with IKEDC.
Having made several complaints about the DISCO’s exorbitant electricity charges on his flat for the past four years, he recently made a public complaint to draw the attention of IKEDC management to his plight. Opeyemi said: “Having laid several complaints over the years at the IKEDC office in Ilupeju for intervention, it is disheartening that none of the officials was able to provide any solution claiming they are just implementing the management’s decision. Previous letters (duly acknowledged by IKEDC) for intervention included January 18, 2017 entitled, “Exorbitant billing of supply of electricity and a plea for help”; email correspondence, dated October 21, 2017; letter dated January 29,2018 with Ikeja PHCN Inventory Assessment form; letter dated January 29, 2018, Notification of Non-usage of electricity, were not acted upon. Over the period of four years, 2015 to 2019, I paid estimated charges ranging from N20,000 to N25, 000 upwards. I received the sum of N45, 665.55 as power bill for the month of April, 2019, despite the nationwide power outage in the month of April. All these huge charges for a residential two-bedroom flat without any industrial appliance.
As a result of these exorbitant bills, I now have accumulated huge sums on my meter account. “In order to put an end to this, on December 20, 2018, I paid the sum of N100, 000 for a prepaid meter to be issued after 60 working days. Up till date, I have yet to receive any feedback from IKEDC; rather, I keep receiving estimated bills.” DISCOs defraud electricity users –Insider While consumers like Adekunle and Opeyemi groan under the severe weight of estimated billing, otherwise known as “crazy billing,” the management and staff of IKEDC are having a field day at their expense, claimed a field staff of the IKEDC, who pleaded anonymity. Oladele recounted the various means by which some of his colleagues engage in shady dealing to the detriment of consumer publics, especially those using electricity without prepaid meter.
Explaining the shortcomings of the current billing regime, he said: “The billing starts from the generation companies (GENCOs) to the transmission company, to the distribution companies (DISCOs) and then the final consumer. “If the generation company generates 10 megawatts (MW), for instance, for transmission in a month, the transmission company’s billing may not reflect the 10MW generated for that month. It may record, instead, billing for six megawatts. This is often attributable to theft by consumers; of these, the major culprits are the rich.
The reality is that most of IKEDC’s rich customers, many of them owing as much as N2million or more, are never eager to pay their electricity bills. Many of them persistently avoid paying for electricity consumed by them. The electricity company thus “tries to make up for the loss by shifting the burden on poor hapless consumers by way of estimated billing,” he said. Sometimes, he stated, the fraud is perpetrated by a corporate client or manufacturing company, in connivance with the personnel of a distribution company.
A company which consumes 20MW of electricity, for instance, would pay for just eight megawatts of the electricity consumed. Then the company personnel connive with DISCO staff whom they bribe to turn a blind eye. “When such a situation occurs, and it is often the case, we (DISCO personnel) find a way to shift the burden on electricity consumers in poor neighbourhoods. (Like the case of Ijaiye-Ojokoro, among others). “Some big end users, that is, the big companies, may owe N700 million as electricity bill, but they are given a bill of N300million by the DISCO feeding them with electricity, after DISCO management and staff have been bribed to look the other way.
“Of the doctored figure, the company pays N100million and the conniving DISCO shifts the burden on poor, unsuspecting consumers via estimated billing.
The victims are often residents of communities without prepaid meters,” he revealed, adding that the scarcity of prepaid meters was mostly caused by DISCO personnel, who hoard the gadgets to incite a feverish scramble for them among electricity consumers and thus drive up their sales. The politics of metering The scarcity of prepaid meters also led to a situation whereby the former Minister of Power, Works and Housing, now the Minister of Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, was forced to do a recant in curious circumstances over his earlier claim that prepaid meters were meant to be free.
Fashola, in April 2017, had directed the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to immediately wind down its alternative metering scheme, the Credited Advance Payment for Metering Initiative (CAPMI), which allowed customers to pay for electricity meters from their respective DISCOs. However, in his speech at the 18th monthly power sector meeting, Fashola stated that he had been receiving several requests from the DISCOs that their customers still wanted to pay for meters.
He said: “Some DISCOs have come back to say that their customers still want to pay for meters and they can reach agreements with them on how to pay for it. Government will not stand in the way of such an agreement. It is consistent with the intent of privatisation envisioned by the Electric Power Sector Reform Act or at least it does not violate the Act.” Fashola added: “What I will reiterate is that the DISCOs have the obligation to meter customers because they are the ones who charge for electricity which must be measured.
If the customers and the DISCOs reach an agreement between themselves, where the customer assumes the responsibility of the DISCO of his own free will and NERC sanctions this agreement, then so be it.” Fashola, was certainly misled by the DISCOs, argued the IKC field staff. He argued that the most important fact about metering must be drawn from the minister’s last quoted statement above. How we charge illegal fees – DISCO staff Sources within the IKEDC maintained that NERC and the DISCOs eventually perfected a grand strategy to legitimise the sale of prepaid meters to electricity consumers via the Meter Asset Providers (MAP) scheme.