AEDC staff indulge in sharp practices, most transformers substandard -Mohammed
By Romanus Ugwu
The level of human traffic in and out of the Kuje Area Council commercial office of the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) on a daily basis is unprecedented. While some arrive with burning anger over one complaint or the other, many others go there simply to protest alleged neglect by the power company in the supply of electricity.
The complaints range from estimated overbilling, low voltage supply, metre-related problems, complete blackout running into days and weeks to faulty transformers .
Power supply in Kuje has really been unnerving than other towns that border it. Residents say they could go from days to weeks and even months or years without getting power supply. Unfortunately, they claim that they do not get any explanation for the blackout or any hope of steady power.
Shoddy deals, sharp practices, lukewarm attitude, sabotage and confusion allegedly reign supreme in the dealing with the AEDC staff. Residents keep complaining that the response rate to the electricity supply problems has been nothing to write home about and not even the frequent change of area managers has helped matters.
As discouraging as electricity supply in the area could be, reports further said that the insensitivity of the staff and management of the AEDC that has continued billing the costomers with amounts running into thousands of naira have contributed to many relocating from Kuje to other parts of the FCT.
The situation was so bad that consumers, in their desperation to get attention, resorted to sabotage and self-help, deploying the services of quack agents to illegally connect and re-connect them from one line to the other.
Residents have also claimed that the few that have functional pre-paid metres engage in sabotage bypassing the metres, while others without such metres groan under the weight of overbilling through estimation.
Only recently, frustrated customers had engaged in fruitless protests daily, threatening to burn down the AEDC Kuje offices. This compelled the AEDC to hire private guards and, in extreme cases, security agents to guard its offices and facilities against attacks from the residents.
On the other hand, the AEDC staff have been under severe pressure from the management to meet the monthly financial target set for them. From the previous fund generation of N44 million to the current N52 million, the area managers have battled steep odds to meet the target, forcing the consumers to pay for darkness, as it were.
Daily Sun gathered that not even the installation of 300 majorly substandard dedicated and public transformers could help matters. However, despite the revenue generation strategy of the distribution company, the revenue has continued to hover around N52 million monthly.
Today, the situation seems to have changed for the better with the discovery of the AEDC management that giving the consumers some level of satisfaction and raising the bar of fund generation require more than terrorising them with overbilling and disconnection.
Judging by the response of the customers visiting and leaving the Kuje AEDC office when Daily Sun visited recently, there seems to be some level of confidence since the deployment of the current area manager, Mohammed Sani Mohammed, in February this year.
According to him, the problem of power distribution and customer satisfaction require meticulous management to avoid wasting the wattage allocated to Kuje, which has ensured that the customers voluntarily respond to the payment of their bills.
Low voltage, overloaded transformers
Most of the complaints from the customers centred on low voltage and overloaded transformers resulting in electricity supply that can’t power their appliances. However, explaining that AEDC has done much to correct the problems, Mohammed lamented that most of the transformers in Kuje did not conform to the standard and specifications because they were community oriented.
“We have 300 public and dedicated transformers in Kuje. I discovered that most of our facilities in Kuje are community oriented, which means that the community or politicians paid for those facilities. However, in most cases, they don’t comply with the specifications or standard. This has made it very difficult for us to control our losses,” he said.
Sharp practices by the AEDC staff
Majority of the problems electricity consumers in Kuje encounter are the creations of the AEDC staff, who indulge in all manner of sharp practices, including encouraging customers to continue on estimated billing.
However, the situation seems to have changed, giving way to increase in power supply and customers voluntarily paying bills without threats of disconnection.
“On resumption, I had assembled members of the staff to inform them of the way I operate. I told them that response to complaints must be very prompt. I even made my official car available to every staff on emergency. I changed their civil service mentality.
“I had met series of complaints, ranging from no supply of power to sharp practices from customers and staff. Some communities would even refuse others nearby from linking up their lines on the excuse that they sponsored everything without any financial commitment from the AEDC.
“I also embarked on sensitisation of staff when I noticed that several complaints were left unaddressed. Faults as little as cable lock were ignored. The fault may not even be up to N10,000 yet customers would be left in darkness for weeks or months.
“On my own, I took the pain of moving round with the professionals to check the transformers. Our response rate increased, resulting in our reaping the dividend now. On daily basis, the queue of consumers waiting to pay bills even without our disconnecting them has continued to increase,” he said.
Improved financial boost
The efforts put in place by the AEDC seem to have yielded dividend.
According to the area manager, the increase was as a result of strategic planning and implementation. “On resumption, I also noticed that the highest monthly generated revenue for the entire Kuje district was the sum of N44 million. We adopted dynamic billing, which means that a consumer could get a bill of N6,000 this month and N4,000 next month.
“We no longer give consumers flat rate billing as it was in the past. If the energy supply drops, we have to also drop the bills given to the consumers and if the supply improves, the bill will increase proportionally too.
“When we observed that we overbilled customers, we would try to address it. Today, with little effort from the staff, our generation has risen to as high as N52 million. We were able to achieve that through what I may call billing efficiency.
“We made sure that we maximised energy generation and supply to the customers through what we call aggregated technical commercial and collection losses. This is the main reason for the privatisation of power in Nigeria, to manage power losses. Now, I have been given a target to recover N87 million for the month of May. It is a realistic target since the metres are there recording the energy supply.
“My biggest target is to deliver to the customers the quantity of energy supplied to Kuje. I want to continue to improve on the generation of funds. As I earlier said, I met N44 million on ground but we are generating N52 million now. I am even expecting N60 million for the month of May. I have to continue to strategize and will never exhaust my strategy.
“There are lots of potentialities in Kuje with farms all around the area. We are generating over N2 million in one poultry farm. Before now, we used to rake in slightly over N1 million monthly but now that we give them constant supply, we can generate as high as N2.2 million monthly from a poultry farm.
“We got N9.8 million previously from our large power users when I resumed but today we have raised the bar to N16 million because we changed the status of some of the customers. If we are managing our energy very efficiently, we can meet every target,” he said.
Insufficient metres
Issues in the past have proved that the staff of most electricity companies prefer dealing with customers on the basis of estimated bills rather than those with pre-paid metres.
Mohammed said: “The truth is that we have been hiding so many things from the customers, especially in advising them against using metres so that we can give them estimated bills. The reality on ground now is that we have noticed that high measure of accuracy could be achieved through metring not estimation. Our biggest shortcoming, however, is that metres are very scarce.”