- Company finally restores light at 10.07 pm
It is no cheering news for residents of Abuja, Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and five states of the country in the last 18 hours as they groped in darkness following the strike action by staff of the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC).
However, the company finally restored light to the nation’s capital city and the surrounding states at about 10.07 pm to the cheers of many residents whose businesses were disrupted with some individual phone lines being down for the most part of the day.
By suddenly downing their tools early on Monday morning over welfare issues, the striking workers completely disrupted power evacuation from injection substations to the company’s franchise areas for distribution to electricity end-users in the affected areas.
Suffering in darkness over the last 18 hours, until the light was restored at about 10.07 pm, were the nation’s capital, Abuja, Kogi, and Nasarawa States as well as parts of Edo, and Kaduna, and Niger states.
Offering an explanation on the unfortunate development, the Management of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) said though there was available bulk power for delivery to the distribution load centres of the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) for offtake to its customers, the company was constrained by the striking AEDC workers’ shutdown of operations.
A statement by the General Manager Public Affairs, TCN, Mrs Ndidi Mbah, said; “Power evacuation from injection substations across AEDC franchise area has been disrupted following a shutdown of the AEDC facilities by its in-house workers’ union.
“TCN regrets this disruption and assures Nigerians that normal bulk power delivery to AEDC will be restored as soon as the injection substations are opened for onward electricity supply to consumers.”
Similarly, the AEDC management has apologised for the blackout following the industrial action embarked by the workers.
According to a terse statement released in Abuja on Monday, the management said; “We would like to assure all our customers that all hands are on deck to resolve the issues that prompted this action.”
The statement signed by AEDC’s General Manager, Corporate Communications, Bode Fadipe, further stated thus; “We would also like to apologise to our customers for the inconvenience and disruption.”
