A community in Jalingo, the capital of Taraba State, has urged the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) to intervene in what they described as long and perpetual darkness in the community for over a year.
The community, Di-Nyanvoh, which is situated in Jalingo metropolis, was observed to have been without power supply for the past one and a half year.
The community, who on Tuesday reached out to DAILY POST with their complaint, said since their transformer developed a fault last year, the leadership of the Yola Electricity Distribution Company (YEDC), has not deemed it necessary to get it fixed or replaced.
Citing the numerous meetings the leadership of the community have held with the company, it lamented that none of the meetings yielded results as the company failed to take action.
The community leader, Usman Sani, who bared his mind to our state correspondent, expressed sadness that the company has not “been living up to expectations.”
He lamented that all attempts put in place by the community to herald the attention of the company to the plights necessitated by the power failure in the area, according to him “have all hit the rock.”
“When they came on board, they made a lot of promises making us believe that they would perform better than the default Nigeria Electricity Power Authority (NEPA),” Sani said.
Aligning their weights to that of the community leader, other members of the community who spoke with DAILY POST, alleged that the lukewarm attitude of the company has exposed the communities to different ills, among which they named to include thefts.
They noted with dismay that they have been abandoned by the company, hence the need for the NERC to immediately wade in.
Some staff of the company, who spoke with our correspondent on the condition of anonymity, blamed the inability of their Yola headquarters to attend to the numerous memos written by the Jalingo office requesting for transformers, as a major reason the community has been in darkness.
Admitting that they are aware of the predicaments the community has been passing through for over a year, a senior staff of the company, said “we have been working round the clock to make sure that we have the transformer replaced”.
DAILY POST further gathered that the business manager, who had been working round the clock to address the problem, has been transferred out of the state.
