Discos Made Over N360bn in 9 Months, Despite Power Outages

By Tosin Olatokunbo

Nigeria’s electricity Distribution companies, DISCOS made a whopping N362 billion from electricity consumers in the first nine months of last year, despite constant power outages in the country, according to a recent figures released by the companies.

Many Nigerians have decried the power situation in the country, unacceptable urging the distribution companies to improve on their services.

A report by The Guardian, last December, said the nation experienced 84 grid failures within seven years, between November 1, 2013, and December 2020. Each time this happened, discos had blamed the power situation on the obsolete, analog system being used by the TCN.

In spite of this, distribution companies under the aegis of the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors, the umbrella body for the 10 private Discos in the country, said they achieved 70 per cent revenue.

According to ANED, the breakdown shows that the companies collected N130 billion in the third quarter of 2020 from N105bn in Q2 and N125bn in Q1. The revenue rose to over 76 per cent in the Q3 the power firms said.

ANED said the development has encouraged them to work more to provide improve electricity for consumers, despite the corona virus pandemic.

The power firms said “The Discos are back on track on their performance improvement after the fall due to the pandemic. Indeed, in September 2020, Discos collection reached a new record of N44.5bn,” it said.

“Due to the severe impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular during the Q2 2020, the ATC&C (Aggregate Technical, Commercial and Collection loss KPI (moving average) keeps increasing and is now at 46.1 per cent.

“Paradoxically, the MYTO financial model that determines the tariff has not been adjusted and still considers average ATC&C losses of about 20 per cent for this year.

“The huge gap between the reality and the fiction of the MYTO model is creating a huge shortfall and the real revenue collection is far from the minimum remittance obligations.”

Their major problem the companies said, are generation and transmission companies, which have failed to generate and transmit more power into the grid.

“Since 2015, there has been no significant improvement in the energy generated and wheeled by TCN (Transmission Company of Nigeria), that is finally received by the Discos. It continues to be flat and is only affected by seasonal effect between the dry and rainy seasons.

“The Disco’s uncertainty on the energy to be received from TCN has become a major threat and it will hurt the core of their Performance Improvement Plans as many of them are based on the projections done by NERC at June’s minor review,” ANED said.