Flowing our visit and meeting with the top Management of the Kaduna Electricity Distribution Company (KAEDCO) on 29/03/18, where we seek to uproot the reason for the epileptic power supply to the people of Kaduna despite the reportedly huge increase in power generation and the willingness of the people of kaduna to pay their bills, the fraudulent ‘estimated billing’, the suspected fraud in the metering of consumers among many other complains.
You may recall that after the meeting with them, they pushed the chunk of the blame to the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) that:
1) TCN does not supply them adequate power sufficient to distribute to the people of Kaduna.
2) TCN’s installments do not have the capacity to carry and supply them with the needed power.
3) TCN takes and controls some of the mega watt allocated to kaduna by supplying them to other places with less need.
It is in line with the above that we slatted a meeting with the management of the TCN to seek clarity before we embark on our struggle to ensure there is power supply to the people of kaduna like other places such as Yola, Kebbi, Kano etc enjoy.
Yesterday, 10/04/18 we met with the top Management of TCN and engaged them on the allegations above. To the surprise of many of us present, they countered each and every of the allegations with facts and figures, and also suggested for a tripartite meeting with KAEDCO to trash the issue once and for all.
They countered the allegations serially as follows:
Allegation 1): To prove that they have power in abundance to service kaduna with minimum of 18 hours uninterrupted supply, they took us to their control station and showed us the amount of power left that was not picked by KAEDCO, which when accumulated without use could cause damage to their equipment, a transformer that caught fire as a result was shown to us.
Allegation 2) they took us round their plant and showed us some newly installed transformers serving as backup incase of breakdown or fault and others were redundant. They made us to understand that their transmission cables have the capacity to deliver the required power only if KAEDCO would be ready to take, even though they are presently expanding carry capacity of their supply lines to meet up with future demands . This countered the allegations of non capacity to take and deliver power.
Allegation 3) TCN simply said they do not have the mandate to supply power to homes, they only supply to Distribution Companies which are the Kaduna and Kano Distribution Companies. They went further to explain that there are communities been served directly through the 33kva lines, on those lines, KAEDCO are to build injections substations in order to control the communities to take power to but because of their unwillingness to expand their infrastructure, they refused to take control of those lines. Despite that, they still wait for the instructions of KAEDCO as to where and where to supply the power to before doing so.
We were further informed that the refusal of KAEDCO to meter every home is simply because a chunk of their resources come from homes without meter that are billed on estimated billing system.
We the Coalition of Civil Society Groups call on the people of Kaduna to take note of the allegations and counter allegations as we arrange for an open tripartite meeting where the truth will be told and we will hold defaulting company responsible and accountable with assurance of improved and sustained power supply, while we set up mechanisms to checkmate their excesses.
We shall inform you detail arrangement for the meeting as soon as we get the parties’ consent and assurance of participation. Though we do not anticipate a refusal to participate from either either of the parties since each is claiming right, however, we shall tag any of the parties who refuse to participate in the open meeting as the true enemy of the people of Kaduna and the saboteur of the present day government.
