By Monday P. Ekpe

There is nothing Nigerians have not heard in what seems to be their never-ending, tortuous journey towards socio-economic and political equilibrium. A new word in the lexicon is ‘band’, a technical term in the energy industry that has now taken the front seat in public discourse.

Last week, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and some other big players in the sector dropped what they considered a big, progressive bang: The elite consumers of electricity in Nigeria would henceforth pay much more than they do at the moment.

To the uninitiated, that sounds like a means of redistributing the nation’s wealth and meeting the secret yearnings of the teeming underprivileged people in the country.

But then, the details of this unprecedented move which are generating disapproval and anger have also raised curiosities and posers. The subscribers of the prestigious Band A who constitute 15% of the total number of 12.12 million consumers, according to the 2023 National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) estimates, will now pay N225/kWh up from N68/kWh.

That comes to a 231% increase. Perhaps for the first time, Nigerians are being told that the high-flyers have been consuming 40% of the total electricity supply and that they do enjoy the scarce product for at least 20 hours daily.

This supposed optimum treatment in a country that has grappled with mediocrity and underperformance within the sector for ages is being vehemently contested in many quarters.There are, of course, those who are ready to pay any rate if that would give them enhanced quality and quantity.

Unfortunately, equating higher receipts by the electricity distribution companies (DisCos) with better services is utopian and has no basis in experience. Where have the hikes in 2020, 2021, 2022 and the ones before led the nation? Certainly not anywhere close to a regional average.

There is no country in West Africa today, as less-endowed as they are in comparison with Nigeria, that isn’t suppliedmore.And there’s no point narrating the cheque red history of power generation, transmission and distribution and the overall toll on both individual and corporate consumers here.

Suffice it to say, however, that when the government of former President Goodluck Jonathan fully privatised the generation and distribution components in 2013, it had hoped that adequate capital and expertise would flow into them and turn around their fortunes.

Sadly, beginning from day one, even without giving Nigerians enough reasons to believe that a new dawn was underway, the DisCos went to town in hot chase of their grossly under serviced customers. More than a decade after that shaky start, the story hasn’t only remained unchanged, it’s actually set to get worse.

All along, the companies either move up the tariffs quietly or break the monotony to announce once in a while. Labour unions have had to even threaten industrial actions to force some favourable concessions from them.

The DisCos have so far carried on like landlords whose overriding interest is rent. It’s, therefore, hard to fault critics like human rights activist, Mr Femi Falana, SAN, who argue that the latest action of NERC is mainly aimed at putting more funds in the hands of the inefficient electricity distributors. The question is, to what end?

Electricity management in Nigeria has been a matter of “the more you look, the less you see” for too long. Anything that has a semblance of solutions either soon fizzles out or turns into a nightmare of its own.

Two years ago, the Muhammadu Buhari administration told an elated nation that it had phased out subsidy since, according to it, it had achieved the harmonisation of the operating costs with the tariffs.

Like many other policy issues that are often not well-articulated for the people, the timing of the decision to continue to subsidies power is a subject of conjectures.