Yelwan Tsakani Community in Yelwa over the weekend fumed and burst into a peaceful demonstration, besieging the regional office of Jos Electricity Distribution (JED) company to voice their grievances over a power outage that had lasted over three months.
Speaking to journalists at the JED regional office, the secretary of the Yelwan Tsakani Community, Dagir Gideon Dauda Gibson, said that they had spent three months without electricity as a result of the faulty transformer.
Dauda explained that they had exhausted their patience and desperately wanted power supply before Christmas Day, stressing, “Our patience ends this month, we want to get supply before Christmas, that is all we want, because we have so many things that we are going to do with light.”
Also speaking, a youth leader of the community, Mr Gabriel Godwin Ebute, expressed regret that they were left behind by either JED or the government or even both for months, thrown into darkness, leaving their aggrieved youth in bewilderment.
“As a community, the youth are aggrieved and they have tried in so many ways to see that we have a solution to our problem, but nothing is forthcoming, that’s why as a community, we came to the JED office to know what is our position and condition,” Gabriel frowned.
Mr. Gabriel Ebute said, “We have settled the issue of oil through individual monetary contributions, the main issue now is that of coiling. We now have our money with the person in-charge of transformers in the government’s circle. I cannot mention the name, but we are yet to see the light, and we don’t know what efforts the person in charge is making.”
He stated, “We are people who rely on petty businesses to survive. These businesses entail hairdressing, saloons, welding, drinks selling, and farming, among others. We haven’t had lights for quite some time now, when Christmas is just around the corner.”
When contacted, the regional manager of the Yelwa JED office, Engr. Paul Ilya Chiroma said that the distributors have explained to the community about their predicament and resolved to set up a committee that would deeply go into the issue.
Chiroma said, “We believe that in 48 hours or so, next 2 or 3 days, we should be thinking if there is no whole supply for Tsakani, we are almost rounding up something, if not all, maybe part of Tsakani should be able to have supply.
“Electricity is a purely regulated business, all our apparatus are to be purchased, fixed and installed by distribution company. So the issue of collecting money, most times what the so-called electricity committee does is that they will take advantage of the transformer is bad, the line is falling. They will collect money from customers or the community in the name of fixing those things”, he said.
Chiroma added, “At the end of the day, they may gather N5 million and may use N500, 000 to fix the challenge, and part of the money to be used by them. So the regulatory commission says that whenever you have an issue like that, it is the responsibility of the distribution company.
“The fact that we did not fix it immediately should not mean that people should take advantage of that to say that we ask them to gather money, no staff of JED will ask our customer to gather money to fix a transformer”.
Chiroma assured the Yelwan Tsakani Community that JED will do everything to ensure that they have an electricity supply on or before Christmas.
Chiroma, however, said, “In case they don’t supply, the community should know that JED is still on it, we will not relent, we will make them happy. Our goal and target is to make our customers happy, I am very optimistic that we should be able to do so between now and Xmas”.
All efforts to get a reaction from Governor Bala Mohammed’s aide on transformer matters Musa Zango proved abortive. Several calls were made without a clear response from him at the time of filing this report.
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