Some aggrieved residents of One-Man-Village in Nkpolu community , close to the East West Road have decried their continued living without electricity over a period of six months as unbearable and wicked, especially when the challenge was traceable to theft a few indolent youths allegedly in the area.
They appealed to the Power Holding Company, the Obio/Akpor local government and other well meaning people to come to their aid after contributing hundreds of thousands of money which was made away with and leaving the people worse.
National Network investigations into the matter revealed that a settlement that once enjoyed a fair share of power supply, popularly called the federal line is yet to recover from willful theft of vital components of power transformer attached to the area.
Our sources claimed that the criminal act was allegedly perpetuated by some indigenes of the area.
One of our sources, who preferred to remain anonymous said that the hoodlums took advantage of the fact that One-Man-Village is a settlement dominated by the non-indigenes who could not question what happened .
According to the resident who is in his mid-thirties, the incident took place late March this year when residents of woke up to a blackout which is yet to be addressed.
According to another source who corroborated the former, when the power outage was taking its toll on the people, a group of youth constituted a committee, leading to a fund drive for the purchase of the stolen transformer parts.
The man who gave his name as Tony said, “we were taxed to pay money based on the size of your accommodation. I live in one room and I paid N2,400, others pay more.
They gathered enough money and we were hoping that in a matter of few weeks there will be power supply to our area again, but we were surprised to hear there was infighting among the committee, mainly youth indigenes and we learnt that one or two persons allegedly run away with our money.”
Also speaking on the aftermath of the black out in the area, Ovie Marcus, a trader said that the lack of power in the area had combined to deepen fear of insecurity especially at night. She said: “When you are coming in late in the night, there is this fear that accompanies your movement to your house, even places you expect to see the vigilante boys, you won’t see them there and we pay for their services.
The area is now without order and we can’t trust anyone to help up.
Many people here use generator from morning till night based on their business. We really need help.
The money we contributed for the repair of transformer is yet to be recovered and PHED has refused to come to our aid because, according to them, their facilities have been badly damaged.”
She blamed some youths whom she accused of coming around with aggression to levy people and yet no significant moves had been made to recover money from them.
Ovie stated that many of them “do not have jobs than to come and harass us for money for this and for that”.
