City Power pulls no punches for non-paying customers
The entity is clawing back billions owed by customers and will at times no longer respond to outages where large numbers of defaulters are situated.
City Power is taking a tough stance against customers who are defaulting or refusing to pay for electricity. The entity says it is owed R10b from unpaid bills by residents.
“We 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,” said spokesperson Isaac Mangena.
The entity has started an auditing process of customers’ meters to assess their status and history before dispatching a team to attend to the calls or outages.
He said, “At least 70% of customers in an area must be paying customers. If not, our technicians will not go ahead with investigation, repairs, or restore power in that area.”
Ward 98 councillor Beverly Jacobs says that she agrees that a culture needs to be created in the city whereby people pay for services and electricity. “I encourage residents to become compliant if they have bridged meters or temporary connections. Whether these have been installed by City Power or via other means, they should comply,” she says.
Jacobs was unsure about the statement that City Power would not attend to complaints in areas where the majority of customers were non-compliant, and will look into it further. “Many people are now moving over to solar power, and would therefore not be City Power customers; would those areas then not be serviced? I would need to investigate that,” she says.
For residents who are unable to pay their bills, Mangena said the city has a programme to assist ‘indigent residents’.
City Power is also auditing and normalising the status of its meters across all seven regions in the city with a November 2024 deadline.
“Customers with bridged or bypassed meters, as well as defaulting customers are encouraged to visit their nearest service delivery centre to make payment arrangements that are available to our customers,” added Mangena.
He said the project will assist City Power to ‘clean up its databases 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 during load-shedding’.
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