Agents of CitiServe, a billing aggregator with the Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC), staged a peaceful protest at the BEDC head office in Benin on Wednesday over the blocking of their e-wallets

The protesting agents, who are from the BEDC franchise states of Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, and Delta, said they have been shut out of businesses since April, following a misunderstanding between BEDC and Citiserve.

They carried placards with various inscriptions, such as “BEDC/Citiserve enough of the suffering” and “refund our money; we cannot wait any longer”, among others.

Speaking on behalf of the group, Maureen Gold, a BEDC agent based in Asaba, said the protest was to demand the unblocking of their e-wallet to enable them to carry out their businesses on the BEDC platform.

“We are agents with the BEDC aggregator, Citiserve. We have been doing business with them for the past six years, but on April 30, they had issues with BEDC and blocked our e-wallet.

“And some of us have figures like N400,000, N500,000, and N1 million in our e-wallets, and we cannot access the money to carry out our businesses.

“Our money has been tied down for over five months now. We are demanding the payment of our money, and we will not leave here until the money is paid,” she said.

Responding, Akintunde Akinlabi, BEDC Head of Billing Department, charged the protesters to channel their energy towards Citiserve, who, he said, stalled the payment.

Mr Akinlabi said, ”When we severed the relationship with Citiserve, we understood that some of their wallets still had some money with us, and we contacted Citiserve to provide us with information, but they declined.

“We asked them to come so that we knew the agents we were owing; about 480 came out of 1,007 agents.

“And BEDC management said we should get the remaining agents to know the total money in order to get global approval for them to be paid,” he said.

He explained further that when they met with the Citiserve managing director and the agent representative in a Zoom meeting, the MD categorically said that if BEDC decided to pay the agents with the balance on their terminal, BEDC would pay for eternity.

“So how do we go ahead and commence payment when the company they have direct contact with is asking us not to pay and they are aware of this?

“We are not saying we are not going to pay, but CitiServe has not provided us with the balance of their terminal.

“We have also told them to get everybody together and let us know what they have on their terminals.

“And if that is impossible, do us a letter on your association’s letter-headed paper for us to know you are representing the 1,007 agents in our franchise, stating that only the 480 agents have balance in their wallets.

“And that any other agent that comes outside these, we should not attend to them, but they have refused to write us the letter.”

According to Mr Akinlabi, “When we demanded their terminals, out of the 480 that claimed to have money in their wallets, only 250 of them provided their terminals for us to know if they had money in them.

(NAN)