By Prince Okafor

The Managing Director, Mojec International Limited, an indigenous metering company, Ms. Chantelle Abdul, has urged Nigerians to constantly pay their electricity bills to ensure power stability in the country. Abdul told Vanguard that the failure of customers to pay their outstanding bills, contribute to the inability of the distribution companies to supply constant power. According to her, “If you don’t pay your bill, it will affect the Discos from supplying power in the country and this will result in shortage of power supply.”

She added that “Until Nigerians start understanding they should pay their bills, when you pay to the DISCOs they will have enough money to be able to buy meters. But when some persons in a particular area decide to be giving Mr. X, Y and Z bribe, the DISCO which is supposed to collect maybe N10, 000,000 from one area, only collects N1, 000,000. Where is he going to get the money to pay me to produce the meter that he needs to give you? That’s the situation we are in the country. They are not collecting sufficient revenue to be able to pay for what we know as the operational cost, what they need to pay for meter, transformers or what they need to rebuild substations.”

As regards patronage from the industry, she argued that “This structure put in place by NERC has to be changed to such that, if you want our product, you can come directly to us.” With regard to her company’s operations, Abdul explained that presently Mojec has an installed capacity of over 500,000 meters, with plans to expand to about 1,000,000 meters annually.

“Our operational capacity is 20 percent of that, meaning that I can only produce orders that exist. It will cost a lot of money to produce. Without an existing order I cannot just produce, so that is why we must generate the orders for us to produce. “We are currently working on expansion to about 2,000,000. The demand in the market is in tens of millions of meters.

Commenting on the issue of access to dollar, she said that this is seriously affecting meter manufacturers. “It is affecting us and it also affecting our customers for sure, in the sense that we need dollars today, to produce the meters, because our components come from abroad. They are not locally sourced. “We would like to see improved government policy in terms of dollar supply particularly, because for us not to find dollar is to hinder the Nigerian power sector. As long as I don’t have dollar it will affect the market very significantly,” she added.

With regard to sourcing for components locally, she said: “We are working on it; it is possible, but it’s just going to take some time to archive it. “There are about 50 components that go into the meters, like the LCD, PCB, Mother board (the intelligential of the meter), casing, circuit breaker and the other rest, and we don’t have any factory that produces these components in the country.

“A lot of critical integral processes need to be in place in the country to ensure total production of meters in the country and that will reduce our reliance on foreign import of component.” She however urged the Federal Government to create an enabling environment that will enhance easy access to dollar. She also called for intervention funding that will enable manufacturers to borrow money from banks at a very low single digit interest rate, instead of high double digit rate, which is too expensive to sustain the industry.