The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC). Monday, warned power Distribution Companies (DisCos) to take great interest in prompt resolution of incidents of power supply disruptions in their respective franchise areas.
NERC Chairman, Sanusi Garba gave the warning at the launch of the Commission’s newly developed Power Outage Reporting System (PORS) application meant to seamlessly report power supply disruption to any DisCo in charge of electricity consumers’ geographic location in real time as well as receive attention or feed back on what’s being done to restore supply.
This PORS App, is accessible for download by electricity consumers from Good playstore and Apple store and this makes it easier than trooping to the premises of DisCos to give complaint about power disruption.
The App project was initiated, funded, developed by NERC but handed over to the DisCos starting with Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) for the text running and would be rollout nationwide soon.
According to the NERC Chairman, “For the Discos, supply is like your printing machine for money and therefore,it should be of interest to you that if there is disruption within the money flow to your business, you should be running around to sort it out.
“It is now your business, it is now your tool. Of course the commission initiated it, the commission funded it and developed it, but it is actually for your operation. You need to take it seriously and I’m happy that the Managing Director of AEDC is here.
“You need to put the right people there. People must not come back to the commission or go on the newspapers saying they complained through the App the commission launch but the AEDC never responded.
“We don’t want that. You need to constitute your team and the commission will monitor. Internally, we have our own monitoring team that will follow up to monitor it.
“The response rate must significantly increase. This (PORS) has given people opportunity to sit within their comfort zones and at the same time lodge a complain about electricity or power outage in their houses.
“But the responsibility is yours and feed back is very important even if you have not resolve the problem. People need to be constantly given feedback on what you’re doing so that they will know that you have not ignored them. This is very important.”
Further, the NERC Chairman said the App would help the commission in monitoring the Discos to ensure that they are complying with the service obligations that are prescribed in the tariff orders.
Garba explained that the Commission decided to text run the application through Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) while other states would follow in due course.
On his part, the NERC Vice Chairman, Dr. Musiliu Oseni re-echoed NERC Chairman’s position, saying that the App ease the business of the DisCos and to ensure that electricity consumers get value for their money paid.
According to him, “This App is ready for a nationwide rollout but we decided to start with Abuja in order to see if there is any teething problems that will emanate when you launch such a new application .You saw what happened with the e-wallet and we don’t want to repeat these mistakes made by other organizations in course of such initiatives.
Earlier, the NERC Commissioner, Consumer Affairs, Hajiya Aisha Mahmud, traced the genesis of the App noting that the initial idea of the project was to make it 100 percent NERC project. “That is for the project to be developed, owned ,operated, implemented, managed, maintained and to be monitored by the Commission. But we observed that when it come to the issues of outages, the Discos are in a better place to manage this than the Commission.
“So, we decided to go ahead to develop the project while we hand it over to the distribution companies for implementation and operation.
“But NERC will still continue to carry out oversight function, we will still continue to monitor it to make sure that it works appropriately. We have come up with several initiatives to make sure that the customers are satisfied, they get value for money and they get services that they truly deserve from the Discos.
“So, the power outage reporting system is one of those initiatives developed by the commission just to make sure that our customers are well protected”, she stated.
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