Eko Electricity Distribution Company, better known as Eko DisCo, and Aba Power Ltd have been experiencing serious outages since yesterday because the Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) which supplies power to them has no gas to fire its 10 plants.

Both manufacturing companies and individual residents in the Lekki Peninsula area of Lagos relying on supplies from Eko DisCo confirmed to our correspondents this morning that they have been without electricity since Sunday afternoon.

“We were surprised that this outage had lasted so long because there has been a remarkable improvement in supply from Eko DisCo in the last two months”, an engineer with a manufacturing firm in Ibeju Lekki Local Government Area told newsmen on condition of anonymity because he is not authorised to speak to the media on the issue.

“We were provided the picture of things only a few hours ago when we called the electricity company.

“In fact, we were shown a message from the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) yesterday saying that the National Control Centre at Oshogbo in Osun State, which is responsible for all TCN grid stations, gave the instruction to be on zero loads for DisCos receiving supplies from the NDPHC”.

Eko DisCo and Aba Power are the two Nigerian distribution companies that import electricity from the NDPHC, a spinoff of the National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) conceived by the President Olusegun Obasanjo administration in 2004, while the rest of the power the NDPHC generates is exported to the Niger Republic, Togo, and the Benin Republic.

“The NDPHC has no gas from gas producers and suppliers like Shell and ExxonMobil because they give priority attention to generation companies (GenCos) with which it has firm supply agreements like Abuja Elecricity Distribution Company”, a source at the NCC confided in select journalists, pleading not to be identified because he has no authorisation to inform the public of goings on in the firm.

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