City Power embarks on disconnections of defaulting customers in greater Alexandra
The City of Johannesburg's power entity City Power has embarked on a massive drive to cut off non-paying business customers and other large organisations operating in the greater Alexandra areas of Kew, Lyndhurst, and Wynberg.
City Power embarked on a massive drive to cut off the power supply to defaulting businesses and churches in the greater Alexandra area in a bid to recover more than R363 million owed to the City of Johannesburg power utility.
At the end of the cut-off blitz in the late afternoon of January 17, City Power spokesperson Isaac Mangena described it as a successful operation which would yield a sizeable chunk of the revenue owed to the power utility.
“We have cut off those defaulting on their payments while in others we encountered different situations such as different meters on the premises than those that we were billing on our system and we have asked those business entities and organisations to visit us at our offices with their proof of payment dating back a couple of months or so, so we can rectify or update our systems.
“According to the law, we are not allowed to cut off a customer if the meter they use is different to the one being billed on the system and hence the appeal to them to show up at our offices with their proof of payment,” Mangena said.
This applied to the Engen in Tsutsumani Village on the corner of London Road and Lenin Drive next to the Alex Mall where the technicians found that the meter number was different from the one being billed on the power utility system.
The old Alexandra Police Station in Wynberg which now houses Criminal Investigation Detectives and members of the Tactical Response Team was also on the list of being cut off. However, technicians found that the meter number on the property did not correspond with the one registered at City Power, and the utility would try to rectify the discrepancy.
The Engen manager John Kalavina said as far as he was concerned, the franchise filling station was on ‘top of its bills payment and without any defaults’ though payments were done at head office.
When asked by Alex News why proof of payment was not being shared with him as manager of the facility, Kalavina said this sounded like a good idea that he would take into consideration in future to avoid the embarrassment of being cut off when in fact payments were being honoured.
The Central Johannesburg College Alexandra Campus was said to have gotten wind of the impending cut-off and quickly settled the outstanding debt of close to a million rand, which was confirmed by Mangena and campus manager Lebogang Moalafi.
