Discos Make 100% Remittance As TCN Enforces Rules
The enforcement of electricity market rules by the Market Operations arm of the Transmission Company of Nigeria has compelled power distributors to remit 100 per cent of the invoice issued them by the MO.
This came as workers at the headquarters of TCN raised the alarm on Sunday that the lingering trade dispute in the Senior Staff Association of Electricity and Allied Companies was threatening the stability of the country’s power grid.
It was gathered that since the privatisation of the power sector over six years ago, the remittances by the 11 Discos to the MO had hovered around 45 per cent of their monthly invoices.
But in a document obtained on Sunday on the Implementation Milestones of the Transmission Rehabilitation and Expansion Programme (February 2017 – October 2019), TCN said the enforcement of market rules had compelled Discos to comply in terms of remittances to MO.
It said, “Given that the Market Operations sector of TCN is empowered by the market rules to enforce compliance with the rules by all market participants, the current management took the decision to strongly support and encourage the MO to enforce relevant provisions of the market rules.”
On the trade dispute in SSAEAC, the TCN Branch Chairman of the association, Abidemi Dairo, stated that the association’s National President, Chris Okonkwo, had attempted to collapse the country’s power grid twice despite a pending court case affecting the union.
“While the above referred suit was pending in court, Okonkwo on two occasions attempted to collapse the system, which he failed because our (TCN headquarters) staff came out en masse to resist him,” he stated.
Dairo said the TCN branch of SSAEAC had written series of petitions to the Ministry of Labour and Employment concerning the matter but this had failed to yield any positive result.
He said, “We state categorically that no TCN branch member or TCN staff will support any action that will bring down the system which we have laboured to build. If the system has collapsed due to outages from other stakeholders, it should not be credited to TCN staff.”
When contacted, Okonkwo told our correspondent that the national association had no plan to collapse the country’s power grid.
He said it was rather workers at the TCN branch who worked with the National Union of Electricity Employees to collapse the grid on December 11.
He said, “Actually SSAEAC worked against both NUEE and this (TCN branch) group, who were the ones that shut down the grid. As I am talking to you now, they are still answerable to security agents for tampering with the grid.”
Okonkwo insisted that SSAEAC was not part of the December 11 grid shutdown; neither did it threaten to collapse Nigeria’s power system.
