• Edo gets 40% of power allocation, says BEDC
Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki yesterday asked the Managing Director (MD) of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC), Mrs. Funke Osibodu, out of his office for failing to meet obligations to electricity consumers in the state
The incident occurred when Obaseki received members of the Federal House of Representatives Committee on Power led by Hon. Daniel Asuquo, who were in Government House, on a visit. The governor took the action because the BEDC boss’ was not listed as one of the expected guests to Government House.
Speaking to the delegation after Mrs. Osibodu had left the gathering, the governor, according to a media statement from his office, said the BEDC has continued to fail in collaborating with the state government to provide stable electricity in the state, instead the company has posed as an obstacle to meeting the goal.
“BEDC has been an obstacle all the way. They will not provide electricity and will not allow you to get alternative sources of power. The state will not allow it,” the governor said.
In a reaction, BEDC said it does not want to join issues with the government, but said the DisCo “remains a responsive and responsible distributor of electricity across the franchise states of Edo, Delta, Ondo and Ekiti committed to serving its customers better.
“In addition, it is on record that out of the nine per cent allocation that BEDC gets from the national grid, Edo State gets above 40 per cent, while the other three states share the balance. We intend to continue to work towards ensuring that various bottlenecks across the power value chain are eliminated to the benefit of our customers in all our franchise states.”
BEDC said it would continue to support the good people of Edo State in ensuring that an enabling environment that will create jobs and improvement in the lives of the Edo citizens is sustained. It should be noted that Edo State has the highest number of prepaid meters all over the country and with the introduction of Meter Asset Provider (MAP) by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory omission (NERC), we shall further accelerate the metering of consumers with effect from first quarter of 2019 when the scheme is expected to kick off, in order to rapidly reduce estimated billing.
As a stop gap on the recent reduction in power supplied to Edo State on some feeders in Central Benin, arrangement was made to connect customers on the affected feeders to existing functional ones in a manner that would not overload the system and to provide supply albeit on limited basis, pending when normal supply will resume after the replacement of the repairs of the faulty transformers.Several announcements have been made on locations affected. We expect normalizing of the situation soonest.
We encourage customers to make use of our existing Customer Complaints Channels when there are issues/complaintswhilst we look forward to serving our customers better.