Amnesty requested for meters bypassed at Ga-Rena Village
According to a report, some customers are still consuming both electricity and a water without being billed.
POLOKWANE – Amnesty has been requested for 247 water and electricity consumers at Ga-Rena Rental Village, where intervention has been sought to provide a solution that will reduce bypasses and at the same time, ensure credit control is conducted safely for non-payment consumers.
The municipality’s credit control process has seen consumers at the complex revolted each time, resulting in violent unrest, and residents bypassing their meters.
The Polokwane Municipality has offered amnesty to all consumers who had tampered with their electricity and water meters and normalise their meters without a penalty on July 1, 2020.
The amnesty period has lapsed on August 30, during which time a total of 624 applications for amnesty have been received: 185 for water and 439 for electricity meters.
According to a report before council on Friday during the last of the current council’s meetings, some customers are still consuming both electricity and a water without being billed, resulting in losses in revenue for the municipality. This can be determined on error reports sent to the municipality.
The Revenue Protection Unit is busy with and have scheduled raids twice monthly to perform assessments to identified areas where loss of revenue occurs, because of both technical losses (faulty meters) and non-technical losses (tampering).
During August, 14 illegal connections were identified, resulting in a fine to consumers of roughly R1.1m.
Estimated readings will be done in the cases where faulty meters were reported.
