UPDATE: Tongaat electricity woes continue

Tongaat residents complaining of high electricity bills are probably not fully aware of how the eThekweni billing system works.

This is according to Tongaat Civic chairperson Jeeva Pillay, who said that the electricity bills probably shot up since the annual tariff increase last year July.

“I have been looking at some of the bills and I have not found a problem with the electricity billing. It could be that some people are being selective with what information they choose to accept. eThekweni has taken to issuing one statement which includes the bills for electricity, water and rates. It is possible that people are looking at the first statement and seeing only the total amount without looking through the other pages to find the details.”

Pillay’s statement comes after about 90 Tongaat residents gathered at the V Mooonsamy Hall in Belvedere two weeks ago demanding answers on their hefty electricity bills. The residents, whose bills showed amounts of hundreds of thousands owed – including one of R7 million – accused the eThekweni Metro revenue management system (RMS) of being the cause of their ever-increasing bills.

The controversial RMS replaced the old coin system that was previously used for billing, in 2010.

Pillay suggested there may be a number of problems that could have resulted in residents receiving high bills.

“I did find errors in some of the bills that I looked at and one was the water meter readings. It seemed that the meters were faulty and therefore the reading was incorrect. A solution would be for people to check every couple of months that their meter is working properly. Also, there was a problem with the billing system in June last year where people were not billed. They then had to back pay for the June bill in July.”

Pillay admitted that there was also a problem with the data capturing within the Metro.

“The problem is not with the RMS billing system, but with the people who use it. It could be that they are not too familiar with the system yet so they make errors when inputting information, which could result in incorrect figures in the bills. The one bill for R7 million was a typing error.”

The Metro did promise at the last meeting to return with a presentation on how the billing system works, but no date has yet been set.

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