Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has countered the claim that the federal government was providing free electricity to Nigerians saying the government does not own all the chains in the power sector.
The managing director of TCN, Mr. Usman Mohammed, who stated this in Abuja on Thursday said the information that power is going to be free will affect them because some customers may not likely pay.
The federal government cannot make power free because it does not own the power.
“Apart from the transmission which is just the transporter of electricity that belongs to the federal government, all the other chains are in private hands.
“As at now that the Federal Government is providing subsidy, and that is not coming enough as we still have huge unpaid bills,” he said.
He said electricity supply services significantly improved in the first 14 days of the lockdown across Lagos, Ogun states and Abuja.
Mohammed said what the country needs to do is to sustain electricity supply.
“That is what we are doing and in the last two weeks that we have been on lockdown, we have performed very well,” he said.
He lamented that the ongoing lockdown may affect revenue generation for the power sector.
He said the company had scaled down operations to the extent that only the senior staff are working along with technical staff who run shifts.
Mohammed said the company had in the first three months of 2020 made a lot of successes.
“We installed a 300 Mega Volt Amp (MVA) transformer in less than a month and this has never happened in the history of TCN.
“We also connected the protection system through fibre which we have not done before too.
“During this lockdown period, we also installed seven bulk power transformers across the network all using our TCN engineers,” he said.
Recall that the House of Representatives is considering a fresh Stimulus Bill that would allow Nigerians to enjoy cost-free electricity supply for two months.
With NAN report
