The Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED) has described the alleged beating up of staff of the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) as "unjustifiable" and "cruel", portending grave danger for the power sector.
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The comments were in response to a report in which four staff of the Disco narrated how they were detained and handed over to soldiers for torture by an army officer, Major General HD Tafida after they had gone to deliver a demand letter (AEDC/DMU/12-21/118) to him at his Gwarinpa residence in Abuja over his indebtedness to the service provider.
"The staff were merely going about their legitimate duties. They had done nothing wrong. They merely went to serve a letter. How that led to soldiers being sent to look for them is beyond us. It didn't end there. The soldiers arrested them presumably on the orders of the General and took them all the way from Gwarinpa to Mambilla Barracks and proceeded to torture and humiliate them. Why in God's name will you have a grown person flogged for going about his normal, legitimate assignment? This is cruel, inhuman and unjustifiable," Barrister Sunday Oduntan, ANED's Executive Director for Research and Advocacy said in a statement.
"You have an obligation to pay for power you have consumed. If you were paying, no one will serve you a letter of demand. Being an Army General does not exempt you from paying for electricity consumed. The Nigerian Army as an organisation, is one of our biggest customers across the country so I can say for a fact that this kind of conduct is not the way the Army relates with our members . I do not know why he will choose to deliberately embarrass the Chief of Army Staff and the entire military like this.
"More than the opprobrium he has attracted to men in uniform generally though is the fact that acts like this insert unjustifiable fear in the minds of hard-working Nigerians trying to earn a living. Being a Disco staff is a honorable profession.
"Despite the fact that our power sector has its issues, the daily technical and commercial efforts of these men and women which ensure that the power sector's relationship with the end users is managed in a way that keeps the economy running is very, very significant. This is not the first incident of physical attacks on Disco staff. A considerable number of such attacks happen across the nation every year when our staff go about doing their jobs. Let us not also encourage the inflicting of bodily harm to the challenges they have to endure. We should not and will not keep quiet in the face of it," Oduntan added.
"We will like to call on the authorities of the Nigerian Army, led by Chief of Army Staff, Lt. Gen Farouk Yahaya to please intervene in this matter to ensure justice is done. A lot of effort has gone into repositioning the army in recent times and such barbaric acts are not the kind of thoughts we should be having of our brothers in the military today," Oduntan concluded.
