TCN dismisses claim of free electricity to Nigerians

Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has dismissed the claim that Federal Government was providing free electricity to Nigerians as government does not own all sections in the power sector.

The Managing Director of TCN, Mr Usman Mohammed, made this known in an interview in Abuja on Thursday.

“There is also the information that power is going to be free, that is going to affect us because some customers who get this information may not likely pay. The Federal Government cannot make power free because it does not own the power.

“Apart from the transmission (TCN) which is just the transporter of electricity that belongs to the Federal Government, all the other chains are in private hands.

“As at now that the Federal Government is providing subsidy, and that is not coming enough as we still have huge unpaid bills,” he said.

He said that electricity supply services significantly improved in the first 14 days of the lockdown across Lagos, Ogun states and Abuja.

Mohammed said that what the country need to do at this stage was to sustain electricity supply.

“That is what we are doing and in the last two weeks that we have been on lockdown, we have performed very well,” he said.

He lamented that the ongoing lockdown may affect revenue generation for the power sector.

According to the TCN boss, the company has scaled down operations to the extent that only the senior staff are working along with technical staff who run shifts.

He said that TCN was observing all preventive measures on the COVID-19 as directed by National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC).

Mohammed also commended the Federal Government for steps taken to contain the pandemic and urged Nigerians to abide by all directives of government to save lives.

The TCN boss said that the company in the first three months of 2020 made a lot of successes.

“We installed a 300 Mega Volt Amp (MVA) transformer in less than a month and this has never happened in the history of TCN.

“We also connected the protection system through fibre which we have not done before too.

“During this lockdown period, we also installed seven bulk power transformers across the network all using our TCN engineers,” he said.

It was reported that the House of Representatives is to consider a fresh Stimulus Bill that would allow Nigerians to enjoy electricity supply for two months without any charge.