Festus Keyamo, Minister of State for Labour and Employment, announced that, the Federal Government has agreed to provide a tariff relief of N10.20 per kilowatt of electricity for Nigerians for the next three months and also distribute about six million of free prepaid meters to electricity consumers.
This was unveiled after, FG and the organised labour consented on using the returns from Value Added Tax (VAT) to temporarily subsidise electricity tariff for consumers for the next three months. This tariff holiday will be operational until the government committee finalises its work on tariff negotiation and other issues that could affect tariff adjustments in the country.
Prior to the resolution, the NLC and the TUC had last month, planned to proceed on strike if the government did not reverse the increase in electricity tariff and petrol price.
However, after the meetings between all parties, the government asked the DisCos to reverse the electricity tariff increase by two weeks to allow for negotiations. An extra week was then added to the two weeks before Monday’s resolution.
The resolution with the FG and representatives of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) was reached after the meeting of the ad-hoc technical committee on electricity tariff, at on Monday in Abuja.
It was also agreed upon by the stakeholders at the meeting that there must be a provision for salary protection for electricity workers, a mandatory refund for any over-billing during the system transition period by the DisCos, and a monthly publication by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) which would present to the public the billing rates of unmetered customers in the country.
Adenike Omosanya
Photo Credits: Guardian and ThisDay