‘Vandals Will Face The Wrath Of The Law – EEDC Warns

The Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) has warned the people who vandalize the company’s facilities to desist in order not to attract its wrath.

The head of communications of the company Mr. Emeka Eze gave this warning Wednesday in Aba while lamenting the rate of vandalization of the company’s properties in the zone.

Eze said the company will prosecute and punish anyone apprehended for vandalizing its facilities and sabotaging its operations.

He said all attacks on electricity installations impact negatively on EEDC’s plans to improve its services and operations which is the company’s watchword. He said that the company was still bent on metering transformers across states in the zone although the process was experiencing some resistance in some places.

He said “Vandals were stealing our armoured cables, feeder pillar units and transformer oil in the past. But now they have turned also turned to vandalizing our Distribution Transformer Meters installed at the Substations for energy audit and improved billing.

Although that kind of meter cannot be used in individual homes but people are stealing them perhaps to frustrate our company.” According to him ” l have received some reports of the stealing of the transformer distribution meters before yesterday.

But yesterday, I got another complaint that in Akwa, Anambra state, some vandals stole the transformer meant to meter the volume of power supply to the area. In some places in the zone, the transformer distribution meters have started working and it is helpful to us and to our customers.

The meters are showing some users of services persons who are are not in our books because if after the transformer metering you bill the customers, and they complain that the billing is high, that goes to show that there is a level of theft of power supply going on in such places.

So the managers are now going out to ensure certify that the meters are not tampered and that those using our power supply without paying will start to pay”, Eze said the EEDC still has lots of transformers in the network which they want to meter while metering customers also at the same time.

He, however regretted that COVID-19 lockdown and social distancing rules had affected the company’s efforts with regards to metering customers as the meter installers are now made to work in smaller numbers.

He noted that the EEDC was trying to handle people who in their areas have been resisting being metered because they do not want to pay for the volume of energy they consume.

He said that the number of meters that the company is to currently install would depend on the rate at which customers apply and pay for prepaid meters. He said that some customers of the EEDC have recently rejected having meters installed in their buildings because they do not want to pay bills commensurate with the volume of electricity they consume.