Irrespective of the outcry from Nigerians regarding outrageous electricity bills and the National Assembly’s resolution that the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) should rescind its charges, NERC has come out to say the fixed charges are legal and will stay.
News Agency of Nigeria reports that Dr. Sam Amadi, the chairman of the commission explained on Monday, August 17 that the fixed charges was to recover fixed costs and capital of various operators in the industry.
“Fixed charge that consumers pay is not illegal or necessarily fraudulent. Fixed charges appear in different names in electricity markets across the world.
“The difference In Nigeria, is that we do not have a good supply of electricity because of lack of adequate generation capacity.
“The purpose of fixed charge is to recover capital and fixed costs of the various operators in the industry.
“Section 32 of EPSR Act mandated the commission to approve a tariff that allowed investors to recover their cost with reasonable return on assets invested in the business.”
Amadi said that there were investors in the industry who invested their assets on a regular basis and deserve to get returns. He noted that fixed charges was not exclusive to Nigeria alone and the only problem was that due to unstable power supply, customers would still be charged whether they used power or not. Therefore, when a customer was connected to the network, investors were required by law to recover their investment whether energy was supplied or not.
He however assured that a remodeling was going on to review tariff.
“The re-modelling of the fixed charge is part of the ongoing tariff review process being conducted by the distribution companies and NERC.”He said the commission had agreed with the national assembly that customers should be billed individually and not metered jointly to avoid over billing.
In a related development, concerned youths under the aegis of Youth Alliance for Better Nigeria (YABN) in Agege area of Lagos state staged a peaceful protest at the Lagos House in Alausa area of the state over epileptic power supply, crazy bills and prepaid metres.
No comments:
Post a Comment