The start of July has proved particularly testing for Johannesburg residents as they had to deal with both load reduction from City Power and erratic water outages thanks to Rand Water. The former has stoked even more ire as a mysterious R200 monthly fee has been attached to prepaid electricity meter bills, which is on top of the significant increases accounted by the City of Joburg for July too.

“This new service fee was approved by the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) and sits over and above a 12.7 percent increase in electricity tariffs. The R200 fee isn’t charged to households classified as indigent and earn less than R6 000 per month,” wrote Brendyn Lotz of the new fee.

“City Power will over the next few years gradually subject the prepaid customer to a more appropriate contribution to the cost of supplying the particular customer category with the introduction of a total basic charge of R200. This consists of a R70 service charge and a R130 network capacity charge before consideration of VAT,” added City Power in a statement.

Once again, the access to much needed utilities in the country’s largest municipality is proving difficult for many wallets. This in a year that has already proved testing financially for many. How much longer residents will have to stomach this, however, remains to be seen.

Along with City Power rubbing residents the wrong way with its electricity charges, other news curated for this morning’s SPEEDRUN include new phones from HONOR and OPPO, NSFAS getting litigious with payment partners, and AI features coming to OperaGX.

[Image – Photo by Wioletta Płonkowska on Unsplash]