The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission says the major crisis bedeviling the power sector is political interference.
Alhaji Abdullahi Mohammed, the Deputy General Manager of Engineering, Standards and Safety in NERC, said this on Tuesday in Abuja in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria.
Mohammed said: “One of the greatest challenges in the power industry is political interference.
“For instance, NERC has its mandate that is very clear and bringing a new agency to mix things up is like destabilising the entire sector.
“The framework on which the industry is built is very shaky.
Operators have written severally on what is happening on the field in terms of duplicating responsibilities.
“For example, NERC will go for inspection today, Nigeria Electricity Management Services Authority will go tomorrow, Bureau of Public Enterprises will go the following day, Presidential Taskforce on Power will go the next day.
“This is confusing the entire sector.
“This is the major problem facing the commission and the sector.”
Mohammed said the commission had been doing a lot to ensure that the consumers were comfortable.
He explained that another thing the commission was doing was to ensure that it introduced a good billing system that would not allow consumers to be over billed.
Mohammed said recently, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company over billed its customers and NERC made sure that the customers, numbering about 900, were refunded.
According to him, the commission has introduced several codes such as grid code, distribution code, metering code and the health and safety code to ensure that consumers were not cheated.
He explained that NERC had developed a new automatic Performance Monitoring Code, which would enable it to monitor power industry automatically.
Mohammed said whenever data was supplied to this automatic code, it would monitor and evaluate data automatically and report the performance of the industry to NERC.
He emphasised that the NERC was working hard to ensure that stakeholders in the sector performed optimally.
The manager said the commission had signed agreements with many National Integrated Power Projects in order to give adequate power to Nigerians.
Mohammed said in another one or two years now, distribution companies would be procuring power on its own, adding that Eko Distribution Company already was procuring about 400 mega watts.
NAN.
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