Prepaid meter billing makes city life more affordable for Nigerians

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I have to admit that for many Nigerians, it's becoming more affordable or cheaper to live in Nigerian cities like Lagos thanks to the introduction of prepaid meter billing for electricity consumers. This is because they can now budget their monthly electric bill and can pay as little as N1000 a month.

The old electricity meter billing used by NEPA(Now PHCN) was a bit of a torment for many Nigerians who were made to pay a high bill for inefficient electricity services.

I remember the last time I saw a bill of a NEPA consumer in Surulere Lagos when I went to buy meter tokens worth just N5000. I saw the person paying as much as N25,000 just for electricity bills. He paid that amount because he was still using the old post paid billing system which allowed NEPA to charge her customers an arbitrary amount irrespective of whether services where rendered or not. With the old billing method used by NEPA, customers were billed on a monthly basis and on a flat fee which has only increased since the 1980s.

Some Post paid electricity consumers in Nigeria pay as much as N20,000 a month while some pay at least N10,000. In fact, I'm yet to see anyone who still pays less than N5000 a month using the old billing post paid method. With the prepaid meters however, the elast a person can pay is about N750 a month which is basically the monthly fixed charge places on those meters whether the person uses it or not.

So, if a person for instance doesn't want to spend more than N3000 a month on NEPA/PHCN bills, he can choose to buy electricity credit worth about N2000 a month and then also pay the monthly fixed charge and that's all. He can choose to manage his light till the next month when he wants to pay bills again.

Some of the things that normally consume electricity for PHCN customers are Electric cookers, boiling ring, bathroom heaters, pressing irons, pumping machine, loud speakers, fridges and so on. Most of the electricity units are normally consumed by electronic items that do heating and so those can be limited or totally avoided to minimize one's spending on electricity.

Posted by Felix Okoli on Wednesday October 29, 2014 at 10:33:36: