Electricity crisis: Increasing debt and no payment plan

Upon enquiry, Eskom once again confirmed this week that, to date, the Ngwathe Municipality still has no approved payment plan to pay its overdue debt to the power utility. As of the end of April 2023, Ngwathe’s overdue debt totalled R1,758,816,354.11, and the municipality has still not managed to pay its monthly account in full.

This week, Eskom also confirmed that Ngwathe had not accepted the quote to upgrade their network and, “as such, there is no need for the second transformer. Should Ngwathe wish to proceed with the upgrade, a new quotation with updated costs will have to be issued,” Eskom said.

Eskom demands that Ngwathe upgrade its power supply network, and already indicated last year that Ngwathe would be responsible for the damage to Eskom equipment when the network is overloaded. Because no one can predict the load on the network, it makes management of rotational load shedding extremely difficult, and a schedule unreliable.

Ngwathe again applied municipal rotational load shedding in Parys the past week in addition to stage 6 Eskom load shedding, much to the frustration of residents who also had to cope with outages for hours on end in parts of town, due to other problems on the network.

* In December 2022, the Constitutional Court dismissed Eskom’s appeal against an earlier interdict that prohibited the power giant from reducing power supply to the Ngwathe and Lekwa Municipalities with forced rotational load shedding.