ANED, a group of 11 DISCOs said it could no longer bear the huge debt owed them by the military, para-military and govern­ment agencies.
The DISCOs have, there­fore, appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari for a bailout to cushion the ef­fects of the debt on their operations.
Daily Sun gathered that the Nigerian military, para-military and MDAs in the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja were currently in­debted to the 11 DISCOs operating in the country.
The association argued that the huge debt owed the DISCOs was now hamper­ing its members’ operations.
The ANED Director, Re­search and Advocacy, Sun­day Oduntan, disclosed that more than N10 billion out of the total debt of N26 bil­lion was owed by military formations in Kaduna, La­gos, Oyo, Kwara and Ogun states.
Giving a breakdown of the debt, Oduntan said the military and MDAs at the federal and state levels were owed Kaduna DISCO, N6.7 billion; Abuja DISCO N7 billion; Ibadan DISCO, N5.2 billion; Eko DISCO, N2.3 billion; Benin DISCO, N3.8 billion, and Kano DIS­CO, N860 million.
His words: “We need to understand that there are three layers in the value chain of electricity. We have the GENCOs; they gener­ate electricity and sell to the Federal Government through the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) that will then sell to us, DIS­COs, 11 distribution compa­nies across the country.
“Which means all the money we are collecting from distributing electricity to the public, we only retain less than 25 percent as our own. The remaining money goes to the other stakehold­ers. When you buy elec­tricity, you supply out and the military, the MDAs and people are either not paying their debts or steal­ing energy, you now have commercial and collection losses.
“In the case of non-pay­ment, the greatest problem we have today is Nigerian Military, now giving the figures under the DIS­COs or wherever you see military formations, they are owing huge electricity debts and the problem we have is that, most of these military formations have refused to pay and they are owing so much.”
The ANED spokesman, who accused military men of beating up officials of the DISCOs whenever they approached them for pay­ment of their electricity bills, however, appealed to President Muhammadu Bu­hari to intervene and rescue their staff from incessant beating and humiliation in the hands of the soldiers