Hoteliers worry over epileptic power supply
Kogi Central Hotel Operators Association, yesterday, raised an alarm that lack of power supply was crippling their businesses and appealed to both the state and federal governments to come to their rescue.
Chairman of the association, Chief Haruna Ahmed Osike, at a news briefing, lamented that incessant power outages in the central senatorial district of the state had forced many hotel operators to close down.
He said virtually all the hotels in the area are at the verge of collapse due to lack of electricity to boost their operations.
The association berated the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) for not keeping to its promise of distributing prepaid metres to customers after many years.
“We can no longer pay salaries to our staff. On several occasions, we have to run generators more than 12 hours to keep our customers comfortable; we buy diesel and maintain our generators and these consume what we are supposed to enjoy as profit.
“Also on monthly basis, we pay taxes to the local government and the state internal revenue service. All these are challenges we often encounter as there is no electricity to enhance our operations.
“The management of AEDC in their last meeting with stakeholders in Okene told us unequivocally that within two weeks, the company would supply over 50,000 prepaid metres to the district, but up till today, the promise has not been fulfilled, instead they brought analogue metres which they charged customers N10,000 before each would be mounted and they were not the prepaid meters they promised.
“It is clear now that AEDC does not want to provide us prepaid metres so that the company can continue to over bill us the way and manner it has been doing since it took over power distribution in the area,” he said.
The chairman, who urged the Federal Government to be proactive on the issue of power generation and distribution in the country, pointed out that many youths have lost their sources of livelihood due to epileptic power supply in the district.