Ekiti State Governor, Mr Biodun Oyebanji has said that his administration had made remarkable impact in effective reconnection of urban and rural communities, that were hitherto disconnected from the national grid, back by investing billions of naira in the sector.
Governor Oyebanji, who disclosed this while receiving in audience a team from the Presidential Metering Initiative (PMI), Abuja led by its Technical Director, Engr. Lawal Lawal, lamented that the huge investment made by his government in the sector have not been adequately translated to effective power generation and distribution in such communities due to ineffective and poor coordination of the entire system.
He added that his administration has been able to demonstrate capacity and commitment to the effective growth and development of the state by reconnecting communities which for many years had no electricity to the national grid as well as providing highly subsidized smart data meters for them.
While commending President Bola Ahmed Tinubu for ensuring adequate power generation and distribution to all parts of the country through the laudable initiatives, Governor Oyebanji stressed that he was not encouraged with the poor handling of electricity generation and distribution system due to poor or no metering stance of the relevant bodies saddled with the responsibility.
“Since we did not get help from anybody, we decided to help ourselves and we are making impact. The only way we are having recourse to you is because we cannot produce meters. I don’t know if the commissioner had told you how much we have invested in rural and urban electricity. We’ve been able to connect them, buy transformers and do wiring, we’ve spent billions of Naira.
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“For your agency to be effective, I heard you saying that meters are coming in, you can only buy meter when there is electricity, but our challenge here in the state is that the electricity coming here is small, and people have even paid for meter they can’t get the meter because they are not available, this is discouraging for us as a government so there is need to be proactive in the drive to serve the people right.
“I know how much we have spent on transformers, we are distributing transformers now, we have connected all our agric clusters but there has not been connection”, the Governor stated.
Earlier, the Technical Director of PMI, Engr. Lawal Lawal, noted that the initiative was a personal ambition of the President to close the Nigerian electricity metering gap by quickly assenting to a bill called Nigerian Electricity Act of 2023 which liberalized to give way to new electricity infrastructure nationally.
The Technical Directed noted the matching order the President gave to the team to create a framework in which the seven million meter gap that currently exist is closed as soon as possible adding that he was glad that all the states have supported the initiative with funding and other necessary support.
He commended Governor Oyebanji for the invaluable support they receive which have been instrumental to most of the success achieved so far as the initiative aims to deploy seven million end-use meters across the 774 local government areas within the twelve operating DISCO in Nigeria.