Residents of Governor’s Road in Ikotun, Alimoso Local Government Area of Lagos State, have accused Ikeja Electric of insensitivity over a blackout that has lasted more than 10 days.
The chairman of Igando Peace Estate Phase IV Community Development Area, Mr. Emmanuel Joseph said the outage had paralysed economic and social activities in the area.
‘This prolonged blackout has caused untold hardship to households and businesses and disrupted daily activities. Many residents have had to resort to alternative sources of energy at great financial and environmental cost’, Joseph said in a statement on Wednesday.
He also faulted Ikeja Electric for failing to communicate with affected consumers, adding: ‘The absence of communication from your office has created uncertainty, leaving consumers in the dark — literally and figuratively — without knowledge of the cause, expected restoration time, or measures being taken to address the situation’.
The residents further expressed fears over the safety of transformers, cables and other electrical facilities in the area, demanding preventive steps to safeguard them.
One resident lamented: ‘We have been using pure water to cook and we have to buy extra fuel just to pump water to bath. It is financially draining’.
Another said: ‘We have not had light in 2 weeks. It is affecting businesses. They should resolve it quick’.
In its response, Ikeja Electric blamed the blackout on a faulty transformer at the Oke Afa injection substation.
‘The shortfall in supply we are experiencing across all our 11kV feeders is due to a faulty power transformer at Oke Afa injection substation. Kindly note that this will continue until repair is completed. This affects 90% of our customers’, the company said in text messages sent to the customers in the area, addressing the blackout.
However, the Ikotun blackout is not happening in isolation. On Wednesday, Nigeria’s national grid collapsed again. PUNCH Online reported that the grid’s failure threw much of the country into darkness.
By 6pm that day, about 1,505 megawatts of power had been restored, but the outage had already affected many DisCos and left large swathes of residents powerless.
Labour groups, especially the Nigerian Labour Congress, slammed the Federal Government for what they called inadequate planning, poor infrastructure investment, and lacklustre maintenance of the national electricity system.
