Madalla residents decry power outage

A cross section of residents of Madalla in Niger State took to the streets on Thursday to protest the alleged power outage in the area; which shares boundary with Abuja.

The protesters, who also stormed the office of the Abuja Electric Distribution Company (AEDC) in the area, also challenged the firm to disconnect them from the national grid pending when the power supply would improve.

One of the residents, Usman B Abubakar, told North Central Trust that they got an average of 72 hours of supply in a month although they continued to receive estimated bills from AEDC every month.

He said this was against the eight hours supply they were promised by the company during their last meeting some months back.

In a letter signed by one John Chidi and Usman B Abubakar on behalf of the residents, which was made available to our reporter, the community also charged the company to fix a power sub-station on the nearby Abuja Kaduna Highway, which they said was faulty for over a year now.

They also asked for more transformers in the town.

The group also charged the company to take the responsibility of replacing damaged poles and transformers.

Reacting the Head, Corporate Communication of the AEDC, Oyebode Fadipe, said the company was planning to upgrade the substation in order to improve the power supply in the area.