Lagos Communities Protest Power Outages at Eko Disco Headquarters

Residents from over 10 communities in Lagos Mainland LGA have taken their complaints to the Eko Electricity Distribution PLC headquarters in Marina, following persistent power outages that have affected their daily lives. The group, led by the Chairman of the Community Development Association (CDA), Babalola Thomas, speaking with Radio Now’s George Onuorah, voiced their frustrations over the ongoing power crisis.

“We’re here because our communities have appareled EB1 consumers. We have suffered so much and several times due to theft of cables, vital equipment. It has happened, I can’t even remember the number of times it has happened.And we’re here to register our displeasure to poor service delivery and to poor community relation on the part of EKDC. We have reached out to them on several occasions. We have used different media to register our displeasure.We’ve had series of meetings with them at the district level. But what we got was poor response, disrespect. And we said, well, as law abiding citizens of our community, we need to escalate this.We need to organize ourselves so that we can come to the headquarters and lay down and lay bare our grievances, which we have done now.”

He expressed frustration on the continued vandalisation of the power infrastructure there and gave insight on the outcome of their meeting with Eko Disco officials.

“We met with Mrs. Umobodo, I think she’s the head of the CSR for Community Engagement, and she gave us an assurance that she’s going to get back. She’s going to get back to us in 24 hours. But, hello, something happened now.In less than 24 minutes, we got another information now that overnight they vandalized the cables. For me, I’m not surprised. The meeting we had two weeks ago at the Jorad District Office in the early hours of the morning like this.The BMO gave us the extent of damage, and I pulled a call through to one of the line managers. He said, Tivix, the security report we gave you in the morning and the extent of damage, what we are seeing now is more. So, what it tells us, what it tells us now is that the management is not even on top of the situation.They can’t even tell us. We can’t even go home with latest reports. You can see we barely leave the venue of the meeting.We are still in front of their facility, and breaking news came in. That breaking news, I don’t know what to say.”

Mr. Thomas decried the situation where the community shoulders the responsibility of providing security for public power installation and urged the company to provide security to forestall further vandalism. 

“Our explicit demand, the first one has not been met, which is immediate restoration of power, followed by provision of adequate effective security to secure that facility. That we just heard now is being breached. So the first and the second has not been met. So the question now is, for how long are we going to wait? She told me now, she told us that something has happened. But I’m sure by the time we get to our various destinations now, another thing will have happened.”