MEET THE STAFF SERIES

There is Need For Night Monitoring to Curb Energy Theft and Vandalism

 

Fadila Aliyu Rafindadi SCM Isa Kaita

CCD: Can we have your brief profile?

FAR:  My name is Fadilah Aliyu Rafindadi, from katsina state. I am married and blessed with four lovely kids. I had my basic education like every other kid of our generation and I currently have a Master’s Degree as my highest qualification. I joined Kaduna Electric in September 2015.

CCD: What is it to be supervising Service Center, can you share your experience with us?

FAR:  Honestly, being a Service Center Manager has been quite challenging and fulfilling at the same time, because we have been faced with a lot of challenging issues but as a great team, we have surpassed them.

I as an individual is target oriented and I always look at the goal and develop ways to get the job done hitch free as much as possible by carrying my team along and making sure everyone takes responsibility for their clusters and customers.

CCD: What do you consider as the most challenging part of supervising?

FAR: Managing human resources in any organization is the most difficult task, but coming together as team with strategies to overcome challenges has been helpful in cutting down our ATC & C losses, capturing new customers, separations and recently mass metering program which Insha Allah will be End to end metering on the feeder.

Our major challenge is vandalism, this may not be unconnected to nature of the area of coverage ("GRA"). Giving the fact that the people are always in doors and less activities are carried out on the streets, we records cases of vandalism often.

Serving our customers has also been our daily task; we have created a platform where we interface on WhatsApp with our customers and provide them the opportunity to lodge their complaint and we resolve them as much as possible (and we have a lot of words of appreciation and praises from them), where we cannot meet up, we try to involve the the Area Office to come in and resolve our customer issues as soon as possible.

The collaboration has be very fruitful.

CCD: What is your total customer’s population and classification in Isa Kaita Feeder?

FAR:  Isa Kaita is a band A feeder with close to 22hrs supply up until March 2022 with frequency control and outages from TCN which is beyond us.

The total customer population on 11KV Isa Kaita Feeder is 415 non-PPM, Over 2400 PPMs and 65 MD customers.

CCD: How do you ensure fairness among your workers?

FAR: We have a system of reporting where we take turns in reporting and as a team everyone has a say on how to meet our targets and obligations, we then analyses and pick the best strategy depending on the area of interest weather red DT, yellow or amber DT and green dots. So everyone has a take on what it takes to be the SCM. It has definitely helped in ensuring all the staff are carried along as much as possible; trainings and briefings with both marketers and engineers have also helped to promote team spirit and synergy among the staff.

CCD: What do you consider as your major achievement since you assume duty in the Service Center?

FAR: I have ensured that all my team members get training and re-training on the Job and that way we have captured new customers and made some separations, we also Identify low paying customers and engage them to understand our products and services as well as how important it is to pay for electricity. Another achievement is response rate has grown to about 95% from October 2021 when I took over, debt recovery of over 3 million naira, enrolling of CCG customers and through field work and monitoring we have brought down energy theft as much as possible. The map metering program has also reached a lot of customers, right now we have DTs that are metered end to end.

CCD: Any appeal or suggestion to the Management/staff?

FAR: The Management has done a lot and we expect more to be done to ensure all necessary support and enablers are provided in order to effectively carry out our duties.

 Another suggestion for monitoring is organizing security and enablers for night monitoring because most of our energy thefts and vandalism happen at night. God bless Kaduna Electric and God bless Nigeria. Thank you for the opportunity.