• City Power will check areas before scheduling repairs, if at least 70 percent of an area is non-paying, repairs won’t be scheduled.
• Residents of Naturena will have repairs suspended by 12th May if they do not allow City Power to audit meters.
• There were over 3 500 outage calls logged with City Power as of Tuesday morning.

The utility for Johannesburg’s electricity needs, City Power, has announced harsh new measures for residents who don’t pay for electricity and then request repairs.

“The entity has started on an auditing process of the customers’ meters and assess their vending history before dispatching a team to attend to the calls. During a Medium-Voltage (MV) outage, at least 70 percent of the customers in that area should be paying customers, if not, our technicians will not go ahead with investigation, repairs or restore power in those areas,” the utility said in a statement on Tuesday.

The utility says that it has already written to residents in Naturena informing those citizens that it won’t respond to outages in the area “until our teams are allowed to come and normalise the area to ensure revenue collection is enhanced.” Naturena residents have until this Friday to allow City Power teams to audit meters. Should those residents continue to resist, the utility won’t respond to calls of outages in Naturena from 12th May.

This is a drastic move from City Power and while we understand why it’s doing this, we also worry that neighbourhoods will embark on witch-hunts to find those who don’t pay. Another alternative is that the 30 percent who do pay, stop paying and the entire neighbourhood conspires to get electricity from elsewhere.

This is a very risky decision from City Power and we’re curious to see if this stance works.

While the utility does highlight that it has mechanisms in place to assist residents who cannot pay for electricity services and residents who need them should make use of them.

The utility is beset by theft, inclement weather and thousands of outages having been reported this week. While the above tactic is drastic, it’s also understandable as City Power continues to battle to keep the lights on for residents and businesses. The utility told Newzroom Afrika that it had 3 500 outage reports as of Tuesday with 1 000 of those coming just from Roodepoort.

City Power also used this statement to remind customers to cooperate with its officials in upgrading prepaid electricity meters.

“We further appeal to residents for cooperation and to allow our officials to gain access to their properties when they come to audit and normalise meters. As these audits will be vital in the preparation for the TID rollover as some of the meters cannot be reprogrammed,” the utility wrote.

This switchover is just as important for residents as it is for City Power. This is because come 24th November 2024, there will be no more unique voucher tokens to dispense and meters that aren’t upgraded will stop dispensing electricity.

Of course, safety is important so when an official arrives ask to see a card which contains the following information.

• Name of the official,
• The ID number of the official,
• The department they are from,
• And expiry date with a colour-coded strip (Blue is for permanent employees, Green is for meter readers, Purple is for contractors, Red is for Cut off-team and Black is for interns/temporary staff).

The back of the card should also feature a hologram of the City Power Firefly logo and a contact number for the Risk Team. You can and should verify that the official is from City Power using the following numbers 011 490 7900 alternatively you can try 011 490 7911 and 011 490 7553.

[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]