Despite Tshwane mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa’s statement that the metro would not pay any further commission to PEU, the roll-out of smart meters is still in progress.
Subesh Pillay, MMC for economic development, on Friday said city management and PEU would have to sit down to discuss a way forward.
Earlier on, he admitted the metro would prefer to get out of the contract since it was losing money. “However, they still have a contract. Until the court case issue has been resolved, they have to continue the roll-out of the smart meters,” he said.
PEU is contracted to install fully 800 000 smart meters, and has so far only managed to complete about 14 000. Questioned as to how PEU would install more than 700 000 meters in the remaining seven months, Pillay said the slow progress was not PEU’s fault, but rather had to do with pending court action.
In the meanwhile, residents are up in arms about the electricity situation. One such resident, Mr F. Sievers, said he received two notifications about his electricity being disconnected.
“I sent an email to the call centre saying my account seemed not to have been switched from the previous system to the prepaid system. Yet my account status showed that I had supposedly already used prepaid electricity to the value of R143. Reacting to their request, I attached a pro forma invoice of R500 and on 10 March, the proof of my payment and a screenshot of the usage to date. In my email I asked them to switch my account over to the prepaid system,” he said.
A Menlo Park resident, Devan Naidoo, experienced the same problem. He too said that he received emails advising him to pay immediately. When he bought R2 000 worth of electricity, an amount of R220 was already deducted from the R2 000. The metro’s explanation was that this was for electricity he had already used.
A highly agitated Renette Visagie of the Kingfisher Greek security housing complex said that the 31 individual homes in the complex were serviced with prepaid meters installed three years ago. Several meter agencies have in this period taken over the task of servicing the prepaid meter contract.
“In November last year the trustees of the complex informed us that the Tshwane metro was installing the smart meters. At our complex, the smart meter box was installed on the pavement. The metro then gave us an account of more than R30 000. This sum was divided between the 31 residents and we had to fork out R1 000 each out of our own pockets. For the last four months I have been paying this account. What I do not understand is that according to reports, these meters are supposed to be provided free of charge,” she said.
Ward 82 councillor Siobhan Muller explained that every time a person loaded electricity, he/she had to generate an invoice with the unique number before they could buy the electricity.
“How will the poor and the aged do this without a smart phone and internet access? Not everyone has internet banking access and those people will have to go to the bank every time to buy more electricity. I spoke to a customer care consultant yesterday and asked about this. I was told that people without internet access would have to call in and they would be helped over the phone to register and generate an invoice every time they needed to prepay the account. Can you imagine the costs of these calls and the aggravation of having to stand in line at the bank to buy electricity,” she said.
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