Ahead of Saturday’s governorship elections in Rivers State, some residents of Diobu area of Port Harcourt, the capital, staged a peaceful protest on Tuesday afternoon to register their anger over poor power supply in recent weeks.
The aggrieved residents, cutting across gender and age brackets, said they would shun the governorship poll in the area on Saturday if electricity supply did not improve significantly.
The protesters accused the Port Harcourt Electricity Distribution Company of deliberately leaving them in darkness over the last three months even after distributing outrageous monthly bills to the area.
“This is the height of wickedness. PHCN has not been supplying us electricity for the past three months; yet they give us crazy bills for what we don’t consume. We will not take this anymore.
“We want the state government and relevant authorities to address our plight or else, collectively, we would not vote on Saturday during the governorship elections. In fact we would not allow elections to hold in the entire community,” one of the protesters, Kenneth Anokuru, told our correspondent.
The aggrieved residents carried placards with various inscriptions like, ‘No light, no election’, marching through several streets across the area as more residents joined the procession.
The Public Relations Officer of the PHEDC could not be reached for comments as of the time of filing this report, but a senior official at the firm assured our correspondent that the grievances of the residents would be urgently looked into.
Apart from Diobu, many parts of the state are also experiencing power shortage with business owners the worst hit as a result of dry pumps at most filling stations.
