…Eight months behind schedule
…NEMSA overseeing more than 20 new local assembling manufacturing companies
The rolling out of phase one of the mass metering programme of the Federal Government which would involve the distribution of four million meters may be coming eight months behind schedule, if it happens in March, this year.
The initial plan was for phase one of the programme to be rolled out in August 2022, but for unexplained reasons, the programme is yet to take off the ground despite the media hype and public interest it generated.
However, Ahmad Zakari, Special Adviser to the President on Infrastructure, on Wednesday stated that the second phase would begin, he said, “It should start this first quarter… before March.”
As if he was not certain of the exact time when the programme would commence, he said, “It should start this first quarter… before March,” when asked on Channels Television, Sunrise Daily.
He said one million units were deployed in the first phase of the programme.
“President Muhammadu Buhari withheld some funding that was available from the World Bank for a short period to allow us to restructure the Discos and we have a World Bank facility that will fund another 1.25 million metres, he said.
“So, what I would say is we know the gap when we started was about 9.8 million metres. One million has been done by the first phase of the National Mass Metering Programme.
“Another four million will be done by the second phase, which should commence shortly. Then another one million – funding has been secured and procurement will commence [later],” he said.
Zakari alluded to the Nigerian Electricity Management Services Agency (NEMSA) overseeing more than 20 new local manufacturing companies on boarded to assemble the procured metres.
“Prior to the National Mass Metering Programme, there was no scalable programme on metering in the country. The first phase of the metering programme has distributed one million metres.
“We’ve subsequently concluded the process for another four million metres that are all going to local manufacturers,” he said.
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) announced that phase 1 of the National Mass Metering Programme, a scheme set to connect more Nigerians to the grid and make electricity distribution more efficient will commence in the first quarter of 2022.
He made the statement shortly after the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said that it had disbursed the sum of N47.66 billion so far for the acquisition of 858,026 meters under its Mass Metering programme.
The Chairman of NERC, Sanusi Garba, had said during an interactive session with newsmen on Tuesday in Lagos, that about 980,000 electricity customers were metered across the country under Phase 0, which was flagged off by the Federal Government on October 30, 2020.
