By Chris Ochayi

MINISTER of Federal Capital Territory, FCT, Mallam Muhammad Musa Bello has flagged off a mass metering programme of the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company, AEDC. The project which would take three years to complete, would cover customers in FCT, Nassarawa, Kogi and Niger states and is expected to cost about $150 million (N46 billion) and capture about 500,000 customers.

Bello during the flag-off of the project at AICL Estate in Abuja, called on the public to protect the facilities to ensure improved services from the DISCO, while noting that one of the biggest challenges facing the government is the vandalism of public infrastructure.

Nuclear power Plant

He urged the Abuja DISCOto increase power supply to Abuja as it was embarrassing to see the nation’s capital dark at night due to lack of power supply to the street lights and homes.

While noting that the relationship between the FCT administration and AEDC has not always been cordial, the Minister said the FCT has in the past few months made a part payment of about N500 million to AEDC against its outstanding electricity bills.

Bello warned that failure to improve power supply would lead to big customers looking for alternative sources especially off-grid ones.

Speaking to journalists shortly after the flag-off, the Managing Director/CEO of AEDC, Engr Ernest Mupwaya said the programme, when completed would give customers control over the amount of power they consume.

Mupwaya explained that meter installation is beginning in areas where customers have been enumerated by the utility.

According to him, “We are doing customer enumeration now, so there are a lot of unregistered customers whom we are going to get on board. We estimate that we will install meters in the region of 500,000.They are in different sizes: we have three phase meters, single phase, and we have maximum demand customers.

“The whole metering project together with other supporting service will cost in the region of $150 million.

“The project will take about three years to complete and it is a huge exercise”.

He explained that there is no cost implication for customers “because meters are being deployed free of charge. We are bearing the cost and we want to pass on the value to our customers because the meter has several advantages.

“One, it puts the power in the hands of the customer to regulate the usage according to the way they can afford to pay units because they usage is similar to the usage of a cell phone where you can actually see how you are depleting units.

“Secondly, you are able to budget and it brings convinence in the essence that customers do not have to come and queue to pay for energy. They can just access a vendor nearby or use a smart phone to buy units from our website.

”Most importantly it is transparent because once you buy units, you know how many you have bought and improves our relationship with our customers.”