Nigeria Exporting Electricity Meters Despite Five Million Deficit niyitabiti.net - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from niyitabiti.net Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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As Nigeria continues to bill over five million electricity customers arbitrarily amid rising cost of electricity, some meter assemblers in the country have started exporting the facility to other African countries to survive alleged Federal Government’s flawed policies.
The novel development bolstered by opportunities in the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), is fuelled by the monopolistic approach adopted by the Federal Government, especially in awarding metering contracts to companies with alleged inadequate capacity.
A visit by The Guardian to some plants and warehouses showed that while the Federal Government’s National Mass Metering Programme (NMMP), and the Meter Asset Providers (MAP) scheme struggle to disburse meters to deserving households, hundreds of thousands of the assets are stored up in some warehouses without patronage.
By Emmanuel Addeh
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has listed project management failure and non-adherence to the terms of contracts as some of the reasons why past metering programmes in the country failed.
Speaking during a virtual discussion organised by, “The Power Hub,” General Manager, Finance and Management Services of the regulatory commission, Mr. Abdul Shettima, also reiterated the pledge by NERC to ensure a refund to customers who paid for meters under the Credited Advanced Payment for Metering Implementation (CAPMI) scheme, which it admitted was a failed initiative.
He recalled that when the power sector was privatised, metering was one of the key components that the core investors were required to address, plus loss of reduction and network upgrade, but noted that unfortunately because of cost-reflectivity , technical partnership and a lot other issues, none of those targets were met.
One of the many challenges facing Nigeria’s electric power sector is the issue of metering. From being a pre-privatisation problem, lack of metering has evolved to be a more sophisticated post-privatisation feature skirting the corridors of the Nigerian power sector for the last few years.
Statistics show that the number of unmetered customers across Nigeria has continued to rise. In 2016, a metering status report from the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) showed that about 3 million of the registered accounts of customers were unmetered. In 2017, this number grew as NERC reported that over 4 million unmetered customers. In 2019, a NERC report showed that over 5 million Nigerians were unmetered and this number has continued to rise.