Outrageous Electricity Bill Is Killing Us: Ijegun Community
The Progressive Estate, a Community Development Association (CDA) Ijegun, Alimosho area of Lagos have cried out over inhumane treatment and over overestimated bills given to them by the Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company (IE).
Comrade Saviour Iche, a member of the community who spoke to our correspondent stressed that they are tired of paying outrageous and unjustifiable monthly electricity bills.
According to him, the residents contribute money to buy Poles, electrical wires and also transformers and at the end of the month IE will share estimated bills even when the power do not last for up to 12 hours.
“And when we do not pay they will remove the wires we bought by ourselves to have power as a citizen of this country called Nigeria, we are suffering and smiling.
“This power failure issue has been reported at the National Assembly where they gave the minister of power order that they should provide prepaid meters to residents yet IE is still charging unreasonable bills for power consumption we did not consume.
“This is a kind of fraud in the highest order, how do they arrive at the amount they print on bills”, he queried?
He further pointed out that the most annoying one is that the IE will come to the community that has not had light for almost three months with crazy bills and the question is, how did they come with the bill?
“As a human right activist, I receive calls on daily basis from people complaining of no light and yet electricity companies share bills even when consumers do not have light.
“There is a case of where for almost 6 months there was no light in the a particular area, the transformer was faulty the community tasked themselves to raise money in repairing the transformer, immediately the transformer was fixed within two weeks the Ikeja Electricity company brought their bills, this is unfair, they are using such position to extort money and intimidate fellow humans .
“Honestly, before electricity was privatized it was better than what it is now, this is fraud. Go to Ghana for instance, they have 24 hours of power supply, you can see why things are not working well in our dear country Nigeria and we claim we have a government.
“This is a government that do not take action due to corruption in every sector, anybody can commit crime and walk away with it”.
He questioned what happens to the budget that is being allocated to the federal ministry of power, communities are the ones to contribute money to carry out repairs once there is any electrical fault in the community.
“We need to say the truth, these companies are inefficient.
Imagine our neighboring countries that call Nigeria big brother are making it .
“If we are getting power supply it would have been well understood but the problem is there’s no light, why brining bills, I can count the number of hours we have power in a month sometimes two hours a month.
“I am using this opportunity to call on the federal government to save us from power failure, we buy fuel and diesel to power our generator.
“All efforts to ensure that pre-paid meters are made available to our people have not yielded any positive result due to the nonchalant attitude of the Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company.
