City Power will no longer respond to outage calls from customers who continue to refuse to pay for electricity, including customers with non-vending meters, non-paying customers or defaulting customers.
Statement fro Isaac Mangena – City Power spokesperson
The decision comes as the entity battles pressures of the grid amid loadshedding, and low revenue collection targets.
The entity has started on an auditing process of the customers’ meters and assess their vending history before dispatching a team to attend to the calls. During a Medium-Voltage (MV) outage, at least 70 per cent of the customers in that area should be paying customers, if not, our technicians will not go ahead with investigation, repairs or restore power in those areas.
For this reason, we have embarked on a Citywide programme to ensure we get as many citizens as possible to pay for their electricity services-those that can. For those that can’t, the City has programmes to assist the indigent residents.
The Local Government: Municipal Systems Management Act 32 of 2000, and National Credit Act, City Power is within its right to ensure it installs the prepaid meters for the purposes of revenue collection on behalf of the City.
As City Power we operate in an environment that often has complex and often expensive priorities and expectations from a variety of stakeholders. We will increase our efforts to collect the outstanding debt from customers across the City of Johannesburg.
In recent months, City Power embarked on an aggressive Revenue Collection drive to collect money across all our customers in the City. This is about R10bn we are owed bythe residents of the City of Joburg.
In addition, City Power has embarked on a programme to audit and normalise meters across the seven Regions of the City of Joburg, which will also involve the resetting of the meters to be TID compliant ahead of the 2024 November deadline. The programme will also assist City Power to clean up its data and ensure unmetered customers, especially in non-affluent areas, have smart meters which will enable them to, not only buy electricity, but to also assist City Power to remotely monitor and control the load as we battle with loadshedding.
Customers with bridged or bypassed meters, as well as defaulting customers are encouraged to visit their nearest Service Delivery Centre (SDC) to make payment arrangements that are available to our customers.
We further appeal to residents for cooperation and to allow our officials to gain access to their properties when they come to audit and normalise meters. As these audits will be vital in the preparation for the TID rollover as some of the meters cannot be reprogrammed.
The TID resetting entails that every non-smart (old Technology) meter should be replaced with the new technology meters. These old technology meters will stop accepting the credit tokens by November 2024 as the credit token will run out of available numbers.
Should the resistance continue, we will no longer respond to power outages in Naturena from the 12th May 2023
