...._NEED FOR MONITOR TO AVOID RIP-OFF_
By Titus Ugo Nwoye

Published and reviewed,
By *lFEANYI NDUKWE*

Sir,

One of the most significant milestones registered by your administration is the signing of Memorandum of understanding between the state government and the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company EEDC.

This is because electricity play a very important role in any industrialization effort of any society. This singular effort has significantly improved the supply of power to industries and households in the state. Unfortunately, this is where the good news stopped.

Its important to ask at what price is the electricity company distributing its Power to the public? How is the government making sure that *EEDC* is living up to its own side of the bargain? How are they being monitored to ensure that they are not ripping off the public needlessly? The truth of the matter is that the staff of *EEDC* are devising several strategies to continuously short change the consuming public. They have deployed the use of estimated bills to continuously fleece the public of their hard money at this very hard economic times. A three bedroom flat with sparsely electric fittings is billed N60,000 a month while two bedroom apartment incured N40,000 and room is billed N20,000 a month whether there's only one television in the room.

Unfortunately, efforts to procure meters is met with a brick wall. According to a staff who spoke on conditions of anonymity, to get a pre paid meter cost N65,000 plus N15,000 installation charges. And you have to wait for months to get one after paying for it.

Another way they shortchange the unsuspecting public is that their staff often collude with criminals as their contractors to vandalize transformers and cable wires. In such a situation of vandalism, the affected community must pay in full before the field officers will come to fix it.

So what happens is that if any transformer is vandalized, the staff will insist that the community should contribute money to fix it otherwise you will be forced to stay in darkness for months. They will never attempt to replace the vandalized items notwithstanding the fact that they Will be losing millions as long as the public is in darkness.
Recently a community behind government house, ifite, Awka had its wire cables in the transformer stolen. They were forced to pay N10,000 each to have the transformer repaired. It took about three weeks to have the transformer repaired and the consumers were in darkness for more than three weeks. Could you imagine that a week after the repair of the transformer, the consumers were slammed with different excessive bills.

A situation whereby consumers are made to pay excessive bills for lights and also made to bear the cost of repairs of EEDC transformers definitely defeats the purpose of the MOU.

Hence, Your Excellency, we believe you mean well for the state by entering into such MOU but the government through its officials should have its eyes open and monitor how the *MOU* is being implemented so that the purpose is not hijacked by some greedy staff of EEDC.