The Chief Executive Officer of Eko Electricity Distribution Company, Rekhiat Momoh, has raised serious concerns over widespread electricity theft by high-income residents and hotels, describing the practice as one of the biggest contributors to the worsening financial and operational crisis in Nigeria’s power sector.

Speaking at a PwC power roundtable in Lagos recently, the EKEDC CEO disclosed that electricity theft is more prevalent in high-income areas and involves well-known hotels and influential individuals.

“Energy theft is a big problem. From experience, we have noted that energy theft is more prevalent where the big men live. We all know that if a big man or a rich man steals this energy and a poor man steals, it’s not the same,” the CEO said.

She added that EKEDC had uncovered cases of large commercial establishments illegally bypassing meters, significantly worsening losses across the network.

“We have seen cases where known hotels, including four-star hotels, bypass meters, stealing this energy and thereby increasing the losses for almost everyone. We are even in talks recently with one of the hotels that was caught bypassing. I wouldn’t want to mention the name of the hotel because we are in court,” she stated.

The CEO said EKEDC currently serves a customer base of about 789,000 and has mapped out short-, medium-, and long-term goals aimed at improving performance in a sector still struggling years after privatisation.

“We have a customer population of 789,000. Our short-term goal is commercial excellence and closing the emission gap.

Our medium-term goal is customer centricity, that is, the improvement of technology. And our long-term goal is market effectiveness,” she said.

Momoh noted that despite privatisation, Nigeria’s power sector continues to grapple with structural and operational inefficiencies.

“The Nigerian power sector, even though it has been privatised, still has a lot of issues, especially regarding energy. As we all know, power is the driver of any economy. If there’s no power, no economy can grow,” she said.

According to her, decades of reliance on traditional practices such as manual metering have left the system vulnerable to fraud and inefficiencies.

“For decades, the energy market has been rooted in traditional practices. We were all doing manual metering, which is prone to fraud and numerous issues,” she noted.

The EKEDC CEO explained that the absence of real-time monitoring systems had made it difficult to detect faults and fraud promptly.

“Previously, even when you had fraud in your office, there was no way of knowing. I would like to mention that Eko DisCo is the only system that has SCADA, which we are using to monitor some of the faults that we presently face. We need to upgrade it because we have about 54 electrical substations, but only 15 are currently on SCADA,” she disclosed.

The CEO said EKEDC has begun taking steps to reduce downtime caused by delayed fault detection with the acquisition of fault locators.

“There is always downtime because it is only when a customer reports a fault that we become aware. By the time we arrive, we also have to manually locate the fault. But, to the glory of God, we have just acquired five fault locators, one costing about N490 million, so we can reduce downtime,” she added.

Momoh stressed that the lack of real-time data remains a major obstacle to efficiency and revenue collection, saying, “Without data, you can’t do anything. A lot of analysis is required, even for fault clearing and collection.”

On the financial health of the sector, the CEO said distribution companies are under severe strain, with banks unwilling to lend based on accounting profits.

“The financial crisis is there because no bank is willing to grant any loan based on the ‘paper profit’ that you’re making. They want real cash,” she stated.

She pointed to inadequate power generation as a fundamental challenge.

“Presently, installed generation capacity is about 13,000 megawatts. What is the available capacity? Between 4,000 and 5,000 megawatts,” she said.

The CEO said legacy debts running into trillions of naira, coupled with poor collection efficiency, continue to weigh heavily on the sector. She also highlighted the deteriorating state of infrastructure across parts of EKEDC’s network.

“We have obsolete, dilapidated and invalidated switch-on transformers. If you go to places like Orile and Ajegunle, you will still find dilapidated networks in my coverage area, which increases technical losses,” she said.

The CEO said huge debts owed by ministries, departments and agencies, as well as uncollectable customer debts, have worsened the financial crisis.

“We have a lot of money owed by MDAs. We also have huge uncollectable debts because people move from one house to another, leaving debts behind,” she said.

She added that high interest rates and vandalism further complicate operations.

Despite the challenges, the CEO said smart metering remains a critical path forward for addressing theft, inefficiencies and revenue leakages.

“There are also high interest rates, which no Disco can afford. Another major problem is vandalism. You can imagine even in places like Ikoyi, we are facing vandalism. What is the way forward? Smart meters,” she said.