US$500M Loan Approved for Metering Access Improvement
The Nigerian Senate recently approved a US$500 million loan request by His Excellency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (GCFR) for the metering of electricity consumers in Nigeria in line with the Nigeria Distribution Sector Recovery Program (DISREP). The loan will be utilised to improve metering infrastructure in order to enhance revenue collection, efficiency, and service delivery standards in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI), as part of measure to address financial and technical challenges faced by the electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos).
Only 5,842,726 (44.39%) out of the 13,162,572 registered electricity customers are metered as at 31 December 2023, according to the report issued by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) for the fourth quarter of 2023. DisCos have continued to rely on estimated billings to recover revenue from unmetered customers.
The metering of electricity consumers has been one of the key challenges facing the NESI since the privatisation of the sector in 2005. There have been several Federal Government (FG) initiatives to address the metering gap, such as the Meter Asset Provider and National Mass Metering Programme, but the problem continues to persist.
NERC has therefore, also taken a significant step towards deregulating meter access in Nigeria to allow customers to procure meters from Meter Asset Providers (MAPs) based on competitive open market prices determined through transparent bidding frameworks.
The desired loan programme is expected to complement NERC's initiative in addressing the metering challenges in the sector.
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