Reassessing LEC’s Customer Service
If all goes well, Liberia’s hydro-electricity project will get done by the end of this year.
Her 11th Annual Message to the Joint Session of the 53rd Legislature on Monday, January 25, 2016, President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf assured that by December the hydro at Mount Coffee in Montserrado County would be completed, while there would be electricity expansion in June of this year from a generator currently being install.
These efforts of the government are all under the auspices of the Liberia Electricity Corporation or LEC. But ahead of the foregoing, there is “small light” in some parts of Monrovia and its environs supplied from the LEC’s Bushrod Plant on Bushrod Island.
Even though these efforts by the LEC may be appreciated, access to such electricity by residents is very strenuous and most often very difficult. Submission of interest or application to the Department of Customer Services at the LEC for electricity may just be the easiest thing would-be customer(s), but a response to map up before billing for payment at the bank would take between two and six months before a resident is connected to electric power. It would even require far more money for meters, which they would say are not in supply.
In such time of modernity, citizens’ access to electricity cannot be through the current bureaucratic hurdles under the guise of the unavailability of meters. These meters must always be available in abundance, considering the population of Monrovia and its environs.
While it is understandable that the challenges confronting the LEC may be enormous, the issue of making meters available immediately upon submission of intent or application should also be dealt with easily.
The LEC’s Customer Services Department wouldn’t even detail customers on the “when and how” of electricity upon submitting application, but suggest the ‘exercise of patience’ to be called for map and billing.
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Many who have experienced similar situation would definitely attest to the foregoing and even cite very poor customer service. The need for the Management of the LEC to re-assess its customer services against the foregoing backdrop cannot be over-emphasized. For credibility and public confidence, the LEC must ensure speedy progress in processing applications for electricity supply to residents in the wake of assurance by the President of Liberia for electricity expansion by June this year, as well nas the completion of the hydro by December.
