Dada Asaila community frets over outrageous bills from Ibadan Disco

Aggrieved electricity consumers in Dada Asaila community, Ota, Ogun State have berated the crazy bills dished out by the Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC) in recent times.

The consumers, who also lamented the alleged extortions by the officials of the Disco, have however threatened to shun payment of bills until the billing system is normalised.

The concerned landlords, who spoke with The Guardian recently, said the electricity firm is imposing untold hardship on consumers in the community through its estimated bills at about N14,000 monthly.

The spokesperson of the consumers, Babatunde Ani, appealed to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to intervene in the matter, to save the souls of the consumers.

He said: “The worst scenario happened last week when some officials of the Disco swoop into the community on a national public holiday to extort the consumers. It was disgusting. They came in their usual way to disconnect supply to households on a public holiday. They come on a weekly basis to collect bill, we can no longer tolerate this cheating.

“Besides, the July bill was brought in the first week of the month and they started threatening us a week later,” he noted.

It was however gathered that one of such incident had led to a physical confrontation by the consumers, who threatened to have mobilised more customers to resist officials from further disconnection.

Some of the bills cited by The Guardian showed the aggrieved are R2 consumers, but the non-metered energy is charged by estimation.

For example, the July bill no: 18/56/65/5823-01, charged N13,239 against 783 units, while June bills was N7,874 against 450 units, including a N625 fixed charge mandated by NERC.

Another consumer, Seun Adeoye, said he lives in a two bedroom apartment but pays almost 15,000 monthly on electricity, which is exceedingly high for a civil servant like me to afford.

“All they tell us was to go and buy prepaid meter but the bill keeps accumulating. Some of us have abandoned public electricity for private generator.” he lamented.

However, an official of the Disco told The Guardian that it wanted to force the consumers to get prepaid meters, hence the crazy billing strategy.

The senior marketing officer who denied to be named because he was not authorised to talk, said the balance of the bill, after calculating the entire consumers are transferred to estimated billings so as to make up for energy sold.