The City of Tshwane says it plans to convert all households from postpaid to prepaid electricity within the next three years.
This is a result of defaulting and slow-paying customers, impacting revenue collection. The city’s finances are dire as a result of defaulting customers, among other issues.
The City of Tshwane’s finances remain under strain. This has been attributed to slow revenue collection as a result of the COVID-19 lockdown, and the alleged R4 billion deficit inherited from administrators who were in charge for eight months last year.
Mayor Randall Williams says the city is now embarking on a revenue collection drive and is prioritising the conversion to prepaid electricity.
There are about 700 000 electricity connections in the metro municipality. The city has already started converting defaulting businesses – with defaulting residential households next in line.
MMC for utility services, Phillip Nel, says they will also be targeting complexes that are difficult to access.
“You can understand that for metre readings to get access to gated complexes is a challenge, but we will target a suburb or area. We hope that in three years time, we would have converted most of the consumers within the city.”
Out of 700 000 households, about 170 000 are yet to be converted to prepaid metres.
“The requirement from Nersa is critical in this instance. It was already promulgated a number of years ago that municipalities must convert from postpaid to prepaid. So we’ve just said now we need to comply,” says Finance MMC, Mare-Lisa Fourie.
Mayor Williams says these revenue collection efforts will assist the city to restore core service delivery.
