Enoch Mgijima municipality is just one of many municipalities in South Africa that does not pay its electricity bill. Municipalities across the country owe Eskom about R50-billion.
The Enoch Mgijima Local Municipality in the Eastern Cape owes Eskom a whopping R890-million.
On any given day, the municipality’s social media pages are mostly filled with a long list of electricity outages owing to failing municipal infrastructure, load reduction (owing to the unpaid bill) and rolling blackouts. Sometimes residents have no electricity for days.
Daily cable faults and the refusal of contractors to work as a result of non-payment have become part of life in Komani.
Despite a directive from Treasury and several court orders against the municipal leadership to fix the problem, Executive Mayor Madoda Papiyana said the municipality is providing electricity at a loss.
“The municipality buys electricity for R30-million, and we get R14-million from selling the electricity, so we are losing R16-million. We are losing more than 60% of the electricity money because of tampering with meters and illegal connections by businesses and residents,” he said.
“The people stealing electricity are not only in the location but big businesses in town as well. I had meetings with businesses, and the only way to solve the electricity problems in Komani is for us to work together,” he said.
He said if the municipality were to collect the same amount of money that it uses to buy electricity, it would be in a different situation.
On Thursday, 26 January, a march protesting against extensive electricity outages in the town owing to faults that take a long time to fix, crumbling infrastructure and load reduction (because of the unpaid bills) turned ugly when the police fired rubber bullets at protesters.
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But Papiyana seemed unmoved.
“The majority of the people at the march are stealing electricity. Last week, we promised that we would fix the electricity and we did. We have separated the areas that used to have problems to try [to] reduce the load,” he said.
Meanwhile, the power has been off for a week, owing to a fault in the town’s biggest public hospital. Papiyana said that by the close of business on Thursday, Frontier Hospital would have electricity, but on Thursday evening DM168 established that this did not happen.
“We have an old electricity infrastructure and we are going to build another substation. We also have decided to stop using underground cables ...