Most parts of Abia State have been plunged into darkness since Friday morning by the Market Operator, an arm of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), in a move interpreted by stakeholders as a punitive measure against the country’s newest electricity distribution company, Aba Power Limited, over payment of statutory fees to federal government agencies.
The TCN, the country’s sole transmission firm, Saturday Sun gathered, wrote a letter to Aba Power on April 19, 2023, with reference number TCN-MO-003-APL-049-VOL2-202, directing it to pay N869210.059.58 within 30 working days. But the same day the same company wrote a letter, with reference number TCN-MO-003-APL049-VOL-202, to the Market Operator instructing it to disconnect Aba Power from the national grid from April 21, 2023.
“It is strange how the two letters emanating from the same source could contradict each other,” said Ben Caven, an engineer and a former executive director of the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA), the only person to have headed the Transmission, Generation and Engineering divisions in the defunct power parastatal.
“I want to assume that there is no sinister motive, but a situation where a letter was written on April 19, delivered the next day to an electricity distribution company, and then cut off power supplies to the distribution company within a couple of hours the same day over a debt of N896m is unprecedented.
“I am distressed by the fact that the action took effect on a public holiday, which began a long weekend.” He told journalists on the phone on Friday morning: “Despite the huge difficulties that confronted Nigerians between January and April as a result of petrol scarcity and the naira redesign which, in turn, affected our customers’ ability to meet their obligations to us during this period, we were able to pay N50m to the Market Operator at the end of March.
“We also paid, last month, N500m to the Niger Delta Power Holding Company that sells electricity to us.”
Aba Power became Nigeria’s 12th and newest electricity distribution company on February 16, 2022, when it paid $26m to the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) and Interstate Electrics to acquire the Aba Ring-fenced Area, comprising nine out of the 17 local government areas in Abia State, though full control of the area did not occur till six months later when it was allowed to collect revenue from customers.
Cliff Eneh, an energy consultant in Lagos, who was a senior engineer with both the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) and the Texas Light and Power in the United States, said that the punitive measure against Aba Power “is absolutely unfair, because the authorities know that the new distribution company has spent millions of dollars to bring the dilapidated distribution infrastructure in the Aba Ringfence to world-class, thus making Aba, the capital of indigenous Nigeria’s indigenous technology, have new 1,500 kilometres of overhead wires, four brand new substations, and three refurbished ones.”
He lamented that “hospital services and other essential services will be disrupted severely, to say nothing about manufacturing companies.”