By Obinna Nwadialo
Introduction
The electricity industry in Nigeria since the privatization era has become awash with many promising opportunities. The industry which was broken into three layers of Generation, Transmission and Distribution with private firms/individuals holding the majority shares in the Generation and Distribution layers of the industry while the government, understandably, maintains its control on the Transmission layer of the industry. The privatization of the industry saw the emergence of 11 distribution firms now reduced to 10 upon the return to the Federal Government of the Yola Electricity Distribution Company by the investors.
Unfortunately, one of the biggest challenges the electricity distribution industry has had to deal with through its existence is the loss of energy through conscious act of energy theft which in no mean way add to the unimaginable height of the Aggregate Technical, Commercial and Collection (ATC&C) losses. The theft of electric energy can be in different forms including but not limited to meter tampering/ bye-pass and illegal or unauthorized use of electricity, non-payment of tariff/bills, vandalism and Transformer Oil theft. Electricity theft, except for cases of vandalism which may lead to technical losses, is basically aligned as commercial loss.
Electric energy theft as every other criminal activity, is not limited to Nigeria. In fact, it was reported that South Africa loses on the average of R20 billion, the equivalent of a whopping $1.5 billion per annum to electricity theft.[1] In India, the central government, aside having pledged an investment of billions of dollars for creating a smart grid infrastructure had in November, 2014, announced the release of USD$4 billion in funding for smart metering programs all geared towards discouraging electricity theft.[2] This is aside having a comprehensive and updated India Electricity Theft Act, 2003 with some interesting amendments thereto in 2007 which has robust provisions on electricity theft.
