By Ikenna Omeje
In a bid to tackle loss of revenue, the Port Harcourt Electricity Distribution Company (PHED) has threatened to arrest and prosecute any of its customers found bypassing or tampering with its prepaid meters distributed across areas of it’s network, which include Rivers, Bayelsa, Akwa Ibom and Cross River states.

According to Punch, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of PHED, Henry Ajagbawa, stated this in Port Harcourt while inaugurating the National Mass Metering Programme.

He said: “For every single customer caught bypassing or tampering with our meters, we will arrest and prosecute. When we install the prepaid meters, customers will no longer have complaints of estimated billing, customers will only pay for what they use.

“We were running in an unstructured manner before, but now we are going to be using metrics, figures and analytics to know where the problems are coming from and attack those areas massively and when we find people bypassing, we would visit the full weight of the law on those people.”

The PHED boss  disclosed that 77,000 meters had been earmarked for distribution across the four states under its franchise, adding that no fewer than 20,00 meters would be installed monthly until the one million mark was reached.

Ajagbawa assured that everyone would be metered through the process and appealed to the PHED customers to exercise patient with them.