The Ajasa Community Development Association (CDA) in Agbado Oke-Odo Local Council Development Area (LCDA) of Lagos State has decried the difficulties being encountered by electricity consumers in recharging their pre-paid meters.
Its Chairman, Abdullahi Olaposi said on Wednesday that many houses in the community had, in the last eight months, been experiencing difficulties in recharging their digital meters.
According to him, after the distribution of pre-paid meters by the Ikeja Electric (IE) for over eight months, we have been finding it difficult to recharge.
“The whole community has been in total darkness for the past eight months, not that there is power outage, but because we find it difficult to recharge our prepaid meters.
“We have made several complaints at the Akowonjo Business District of the company, but their responses and answers to our plights made it difficult for many of the landlords to reload their meters.
“Imagine IE asking residents of the community to produce their drivers’ licences, international passports and other means of identification before having access to electricity; it is uncalled for,’’ Olaposi said.
The CDA chairman said that the affected houses were initially asked to pay their previous debts on installment with each house programmed to pay N10, 000 to N15, 000 as the case might be.
“This arrangement was later halted due to new policy of providing means of identifications before the first attempt of loading the pre-paid meters which make it more difficult for us to recharge,’’ he said.
According to him, many houses in the community are owned by elderly people who does not have international passport or driver licence.
“Most of the houses here were built by their children, leaving their aged parents to occupy while they sojourn abroad.
“So many of us cannot even drive, talk less of having international passport for travelling,’’ he added.
Also, Mr Lawrence Okoye, a staff of IE in Akowonjo Business District, in charge of Ajasa Community, told NAN that customers needed to produce their means of identification before configuring them to the database.
“We need a means of identifications of our customers for reference purpose before they can recharge their pre-paid meters for the first time.
“They must produce either drivers licences, voter cards or their international passports to allow them have access to first recharge on the digital meters,’’ he said.
