A federal high court in Kano has issued an order restraining the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and the Kano Electricity Distribution Company (KEDCO) from implementing the new electricity tariff for Band A consumers.

Ruling on an ex parte motion on Thursday, Abdullahi Liman, presiding judge, made an interim order restraining NERC and KEDCO from going ahead with the impending tariff pending the hearing and determination of the motion on notice filed before it.

The order also restrained the defendant from intimidating and threatening to disconnect the applicants’ electricity supply for non-acceptance of the new increased tariff.

The suit marked FHC/KN/CS/144/2024 was filed by Super Sack Company Limited and BBY Sacks Limited.

Others are Mama Sannu Industries Limited, Dala Foods Nigeria Limited, Tofa Textile Limited and Manufacturers Association Of Nigeria Limited (MAN).

The motion ex-parte was moved by Abubakar Mahmoud, counsel to the plaintiffs.

On April 3, NERC approved an increase in electricity tariff for customers under the Band A classification.

The commission said customers under the category, who receive 20 hours of electricity supply daily, would begin to pay N225 per kilowatt (kW), starting from April 3 — up from N66.

The sudden hike has since been criticised by the house of representatives and other stakeholders who have asked NERC to suspend the implementation of the new tariff.

The naira on Thursday slightly depreciated at the official market, trading at ₦1,402.67 to the dollar.

Data from the official trading platform of the FMDQ Exchange, a platform that oversees the Nigerian Autonomous Foreign Exchange Market (NAFEM), showed that the naira lost ₦11.71

This represents a 0.84% loss when compared to the previous trading date on Tuesday, April 30, when it exchanged at 1,390.96 to a dollar.

However, the total daily turnover increased to 232.84 million dollars on Thursday, up from 225.36 million dollars recorded on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, at the Investor’s and Exporter’s (I&E) window, the naira traded between ₦1,445.00 and ₦1,299.42 against the dollar.

MTN Nigeria says it has fully barred a total of 8.6 million lines from the network in line with the directive of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) on SIMs not linked to the National Identification Number (NIN) of the users.

The company disclosed this in its first quarter (Q1) 2024 financial report, noting that this impacted its business in the quarter.

However, to provide more time for the subscribers with less than five lines linked to an unverified NIN to complete the necessary verification exercise, MTN disclosed that the NCC has extended the 15 April deadline to 31 July 2024.

According to MTN, the lines that have been fully barred are those of subscribers who did not submit their NIN and those with more than five lines linked to an unverified NIN.

Highlighting the impact of the NIN-SIM linkage exercise and the regulatory directive, MTN Nigeria’s CEO, Karl Toriola, said:

“During the quarter, we also continued to manage the effects on our business of the industry-wide directive of the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) for a full barring of subscriber lines not linked to their National Identity Number (NIN) – the NIN-SIM directive.

“This impacted the development of our user base across all of our key business units (voice, data, and fintech) in Q1 2024.

“Although we had to fully bar 8.6 million subscribers in line with the directive, we minimised the net effect of the barred subscribers, and our total number of subscribers only decreased by 2 million in Q1, closing with a total of 77.7 million subscribers.”

Toriola said this demonstrated the effectiveness of the company’s customer value management (CVM) initiatives, which helped it to retain affected customers and reduce churn, as well as to drive gross connections.

Meanwhile, the company also reported a decline in its data subscribers in the quarter under review. According to the MTN’s CEO, active data subscribers declined marginally by approximately 78,000 to 44.5 million.

“Notwithstanding these headwinds, we recorded increased activity within the base, with voice traffic rising by 5.1% and data traffic by 40.6%.

“This is a result of the consistent growth in demand for data and voice, supported by our attractive offers to customers and continuous investment in network quality and coverage,” Toriola stated.

Data from the NCC show that total active mobile subscriptions in Nigeria across the networks of MTN, Airtel, Globacom and 9mobile, which stood at 224.4 million in December 2023 had declined to 219 million as of March 2024 as all the telecom operators implemented the policy on the mandatory NIN-SIM linkage.