By Okechukwu Okechukwu
The Chairman of Human Rights Liberty Access and Peace Defenders Foundation (HURIDE), Dede Uzor A. Uzor, has urged the Federal Government to moderate the excessive exploitation of NIgerians by Electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOs) by breaking their monopolies or outrightly revoke their licenses.
Dede Uzor who is also the South East chairman of Campaign for Democracy (CD), said this has become imperative given the fact that DISCOs have become conduit pipe and an avenue through which consumers are being criminally exploited in the name of estimated and crazy bills without providing light.
The activist who spoke when he addressed newsmen in Enugu State yesterday lamented that inspite of this exploitative tendencies, they are not providing services to their customers.
He regretted that it is still the same customers who purchase transformers, cable and other accessories when these items go bad.
Dede Uzor decried that DISCOS do not do anything to improve power supply or serve their customers satisfactorily except to collect money from electricity consumers though their crafty, criminal and crazy billings for those in estimated bills and fast-made exploited prepaid metres.
For those using prepaid metres, he said, DISCOs have installed fast-reading metres that make power consumption for the customers very expensive and exploitative.
This, he lamented, was in addition to the inbuilt system which makes the metres enter into what they call tamper code.
In all these, said the rights activists, DISCOs would not provide sufficient power to their customers even when there is enough power in the system.
Dede Uzor called on Federal Government as a matter of immediacy to develop other sources of generating power such solar as well as allow more companies, organisations and individuals who can generate their own power to do so and distribute without unnecessary bottleneck from the system.
These, he said, will help crash the the cost of power in the country like that of telecommunication, lamenting that the Discos as presently constituted enjoy monopoly which power reform initially sought to break.
Unfortunately, said HURIDE boss, the Federal Government especially this President Muhammadu Buhari led abysmal All Progressives Congress (APC) administration has not demonstrated enough political will to improve power supply in the country.
"They have not done anything to improve power in the country..They cannot even compel the Discos to carry out the Federal Government metering programme.
And that is why estimated billing system persists as the major source of exploiting consumers with it's bogus and arrangee prepaid-high-fast metres " Dede Uzor decried.
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