By Femi Anamelechi
Aba Power, Nigeria’s 12th electricity distribution company (DisCo), has attributed the success of its ongoing free meter campaign to the cooperation of its customers. In an interview with journalists today, the Aba Power Managing Director, Ugo Opiegbe, said without the “enthusiastic cooperation of our teeming customers, we would not have recorded the roaring success that has seen us provide free smart meters more than any Disco in Nigeria’s history since the resumption of the free meter rollout a month ago”.Opiegbe revealed that the customers have been separating their meters and getting them ready for separate meter installation before the arrival of teams installing the prepaid meters, as the utility has been urging the consumers to do. “Once they get a qualified electrician to separate their wires in buildings and premises where there is more than one customer”, he remarked, “we will provide the required meters without any form of payment”.The meters are being installed from feeder to feeder, with seven of the 30 feeders in the Aba Ring-fenced Area already covered.
The campaign is on the Barracks and Abayi feeders which cover such major roads and streets as the famous Azikiwe and Milverton roads.The utility is providing 20,000 meters free of charge monthly, in conjunction with its four indigenous and foreign partners.“We are firmly on the path to metering 100,000 customers this year”, declared Opiegbe.Though there are officially 200,000 electricity in the Aba Ring-fenced Area which comprises nine of the 17 local government areas in Abia State, Aba Power is preparing to provide free meters for more than this number of consumers for over N33 billion, according to the Managing Director.“Two hundred thousand customers”, he said, “are captured in the database, but the number should be much higher because there are buildings with, say, eight flats but have only one meter, resulting in the eight customers being regarded as one.“But we are now giving each flat a separate meter, so as to make for transparency, easy payment, and reduce tensions arising from the refusal of some people to pay the same amount as others they feel consume more power”.
