The Consumer Protection Council has warned the nation’s electricity distribution companies against arbitrary billing and group disconnection of electricity supply without consideration to individual compliance.
It said such practices were clear abuse of consumers’ rights.
The Director General of the Council, Mr. Babatunde Irukera, disclosed that it had received several complaints from the consumers over the two issues, warning that the council would no longer tolerate further infractions.
Though Irukera who admitted that he understood the challenges facing the DISCOs, nonetheless insisted that there “is no excuse for negligence in the treatment of consumers.”
He said, “The key complaints that we receive are arbitrary, unsupported and unreasonable billing; people not being treated with dignity, the complaint resolution process is either lacking or unclear and there’s really no respect for
people.
“Consumers’ complaints have not been primarily about supply, but about billing for non-existent supply. As a matter of fact, a vast majority of supply complaints are attributed to the fact that DISCOs ask consumers to pay for something that was not supplied and the other significant reason is, group disconnection.”
According to him, DISCOs have got to a point where no one takes their bills seriously anymore, because they are considered
outrageous.
“I think the pressure on metering will not be so bad if the estimated billing was more transparent and reasonable. What DISCOs are doing is connecting their balance sheets to receivables from consumers, but consumers are connecting what they owe to what they receive.
“For me, there’s something fundamentally wrong with penalising people because of the conduct of others. It is just not excusable. Government should never do that to its people. But if government does it as a state actor, as inexcusable as it is, it might even be
permissible.
“But one person who has absolutely no right and should never have the prerogative to do it is a private citizen to another private citizen. And that is what DISCOs do. They group-disconnect consumers. If there’s one responsible consumer who is being disconnected unjustly, what you are doing is that you are discouraging responsibility”, he lamented.
