 |
| DisCo technicians inspect meters as billing rises. |
Monthly takings by Nigeria’s distribution firms slid in June 2025, falling by roughly ₦9.46 billion from May to reach ₦182.11 billion, a drop equal to about 4.93 percent on the month.
The decline comes even as the sector billed customers ₦237.85 billion for energy used that month, producing a higher collection efficiency than the month before, with collections representing 76.57 percent of billed charges.
Put bluntly, companies sent bigger bills and took in less cash than they could have, but they managed to collect a larger share of what they billed, lifting collection efficiency from 73.17 percent in May to the 76.57 percent recorded in June.
NERC’s monthly fact sheet for June lists Eko, Ikeja and Abuja DisCos as the biggest revenue collectors for the month, with Eko at about ₦33.18 billion, Ikeja at ₦32.66 billion and Abuja at ₦30.11 billion, while Yola, Kaduna and Jos sat at the bottom of the table with ₦2.96 billion, ₦3.62 billion and ₦5.71 billion respectively.
Those numbers matter because they show how uneven the market remains: a few urban franchises pull in tens of billions, while utilities serving far-off zones bring in a fraction of that, leaving big gaps in cash flow across the system.
Across the first five months of 2025 the DisCos had already pulled in nearly a trillion naira from customers, putting the sector on track to match or beat full-year 2024 revenue figures if the trend held, a fact that has left industry watchers puzzled given the steady decline in on-grid supply hours.
Consumers are still reporting poor service, frequent outages, and billing fights, and customer groups point the finger at weak metering coverage and estimated bills as the central grievance that keeps trust low.
The consumer view is straightforward: many people say they keep paying for power that never shows up on their lines, and that unresolved meter rollout remains the root cause of ongoing billing disputes across the country.
Regulators track two numbers closely — what gets billed and what gets collected — and the June factsheet makes clear the gap remains large enough to affect remittances to market bodies that sit upstream, including the companies that generate and transmit power.
A separate, but related, headache for the sector is mounting industry debt and unpaid obligations, which have prompted oversight bodies in the National Assembly to call DisCos to account over large sums owed to the federal coffers and market counterparties.
Lawmakers have flagged a cumulative liability figure running into the trillions, and they have summoned major distribution firms to explain how they will meet those obligations and how funds are being managed through the market chain.
From an operational view, the mix of higher billed amounts and a lower absolute cash take shows there are both billing and demand issues at play, with parts of the system still unable to translate higher bills into higher receipts.
Industry metrics also point to another looming problem: technical and commercial losses remain stubbornly high, and those losses act like a leak in a bucket — no matter how much water you pour in, a big portion drains away before it reaches the household end.
The factsheet’s breakdown shows big regional differences in both energy billed and energy collected, which is why some companies report near-perfect collection during certain months while others lag badly, dragged down by system theft, meter gaps, and weak revenue remittance chains.
For consumers, the monthly numbers mean this: your DisCo might be billing more but not necessarily serving you better, and in many places the number of customers still on estimated billing remains worryingly high.
For the market, the math is plain—billing more without fixing distribution faults, losses, and metering problems simply moves the question of who ultimately pays and who gets short-changed further down the line.
Some distribution firms argue that broader market shortfalls limit their ability to invest in improvements, citing remittance delays and under-recovery on tariffs as barriers to funding grid upgrades and meter rollouts.
Others inside the sector say policy gaps and enforcement snags complicate efforts to clamp down on non-technical losses and expand prepaid metering fast enough to end the cycle of estimated billing and disputes.
A crowded policy calendar now includes fresh oversight from the legislature and closer scrutiny from regulators who publish these monthly factsheets to show where cash is moving and where it is not, giving stakeholders a clearer line of sight on weak links.
Investors and market watchers watch the collection efficiency figure like a pulse, because the higher the share of billed revenue that gets collected, the easier it is for companies to meet market remittances and keep supply chains from seizing up.
June’s uptick in collection efficiency, while welcome, did not translate to higher absolute receipts, a reminder that percentage gains mean little if the billed base moves in the opposite direction.
In practical terms, a rise in efficiency combined with falling total collections can leave the whole system with less cash to run normal operations, pay for fuel and grid services, and fund meter installations that would shrink billing disputes.
The NERC factsheet and industry tracking also show a persistent mismatch between energy supplied into the distribution network and energy that finds its way onto customer meters, a gap that fuels questions about accuracy and accountability at every step.
That mismatch feeds into wider public debate over whether the pace of metering and the enforcement of anti-theft measures can be accelerated without a clear reworking of how revenue flows from customers to generators, through transmission to distribution companies, and then back into the market.
For now, the June snapshot keeps the sector in familiar territory: higher billed amounts on paper, modest gains in collection rate, falling monthly takings, and a clutch of regulators and lawmakers asking hard questions about payment chains and customer fairness.
Those are the confirmed numbers from the regulator’s factsheet and contemporaneous reporting, and they form the ledger for policymakers, market operators and consumers as the year moves on.