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Fashola insists DisCos must be responsive to consumers’ yearnings

By Samson Ezea
21 July 2018   |   3:19 am
Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, yesterday defended his directives to electricity regulators to ensure electricity distributors are more responsive to customers’ yearnings. In a statement, he personally signed and made available through his aides, Fashola also criticised an official who wrote defending the electricity distributors (DisCos). Fashola criticised Sunday Oduntan, who…

Minister of Works, Power and Housing Babatunde Fashola

Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, yesterday defended his directives to electricity regulators to ensure electricity distributors are more responsive to customers’ yearnings.

In a statement, he personally signed and made available through his aides, Fashola also criticised an official who wrote defending the electricity distributors (DisCos).

Fashola criticised Sunday Oduntan, who he said wrote defending the DisCos and presented “himself as Executive Director, Research and Advocacy of the Association of Electricity Distributors (ANED).

“If ANED is not a licensee, who is ANED?An NGO? If so, they should listen to consumers because Nothing is Going on about poor service,” the minister wrote.

“The BPE, NBET and NERC, to whom my directives were made, contracted individually with DisCos, not as an association. Any right thinking and well-meaning person knows that power supply has economic consequences and has political relevance.

“However to suggest therefore that my directives were political, turns reality on its head; because for the past 20 months, in all my public briefings at monthly meetings with the DisCos, these same issues of service delivery of meters, estimated billings, investment in distribution equipment by DisCos have dominated my remarks.

“However, assuming this was not so, do the onset of elections preclude the quest for better service or continued Governance?

“If Oduntan represents the DisCos who, for reasons best known to them, choose not to act to save their investments, that is a matter of choice for them.

I do not recognise him, because the law that guides my functions does not recognise him.

“His statement that no directives from me will save the power sector from collapse, is consistent with the views of someone who has no skin in the game.

It is perhaps a Freudian revelation of the mindset of those he represents, whoever they may be,” the statement read

Reacting, Mr Sunday Oduntan told The Guardian on phone yesterday that he cannot join issue or go personal with Fashola on the matter.

“We have made our position public and known. I cannot join issue with Minister of Power. He is a Minister of the Federal Republic and I have respect for him and his office.

There is no doubt whether I represent DisCos or not.

I represent them and instead of attacking my personality for saying the truth, Fashola should address the issues at stake,” Oduntan said.

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