Some residents of Apapa road and Ebutte Metta, in Lagos State, on Wednesday protested 32 days power outage by the Eko Electricity Distribution company (EKEDC), Lagos.
The residents, under the aegis of Concerned Community Development Associations, (CDAs), staged a peaceful rally on major streets, and submitted a protest letter to the EKEDC District Manager in the area.
The protesters carried placards with various inscriptions as they marched to the district office of the company in Ebute-Meta.
Some of the placards read: “EKEDC, our mumu don do,” “This extortion must stop,” “We are your customers, we know our rights,” “Stop distributing bills when there is no supply” and “Enough is enough”.
Alhaji Mudasiru Taiwo, a former Chairman of the association told the News Agency of Nigeria that EKEDC was just extorting residents of the area.
“When EKEDC brings electricity for three days, within those days, they will bring bills and make sure the residents pay for the bills, then the residents would be on blackout for 27 days.
“So, when they brought the last bills, we rejected them because we cannot continue to pay for what we did not consume.
“Honestly, there is no justification for the bills when there was no supply throughout the month of February.
“So, we are thinking they may still bring bills this month despite the outage, that is why we came out to protest, we do not want a repeat of last month’s situation,” Taiwo said.
Mrs Funke Ilori, a civil servant with Lagos State Government, who resides on Thomas Str., Ebute-Meta, called on officials of the company to remove their cables from the poles, since they no longer supplied power to them.
“In the last 32 days that we have been on outage, majority of us have resigned to destiny, so I will suggest that EKEDC should come and remove our wires from the poles.
