Milking citizens is unacceptable
SEVERAL Durban residents have been shocked by their electricity bills. The new R620 million Revenue Management System has gone bonkers, with some residents getting astronomical charges for water and electricity.
A Greenwood Park resident saw her energy bill escalate from R1 500 to R7 000, then to R9 000, R14 000 and finally to R17 000. She went to the municipal offices, only to get the run-around and be left in tears.
Letitia Leonard from Newlands East received a bill for R30 000 and was sent from pillar to post querying the account.
There were more outrageous bills to come. Silverglen pensioner Bill Govender got the fright of his life when he got a bill for R531 770. In October last year, 67-year-old Durban pensioner Kasturie Lachman, who lives alone, got a staggering R4.7 million utility bill. But the mother of all bills was for Chatsworth pensioner, Morgan Naicker, who had sleepless nights when he got a whopping R7m bill. (“R7 million utility bill shocks pensioner”, POST, February 22-26) Four months later, after several fruitless queries, the error has still not been rectified. What if a pensioner with a heart condition dies from shock?
Yet the municipality denies culpability. Who should be blamed for a R7m bill? The computer? Doesn’t anyone check these bills before they are posted? City treasurer Krish Kumar says the public should go to the municipal offices and not run to the media, which sensationalises the issue. Does Krish Kumar know how inefficient, indifferent and uncaring the municipal staff are?
Some time ago I went to the local office to claim for water loss, where my claim was supposedly attended to. When I went back later to check on it, I was told it had never been entered into the computer and so it had expired. It’s useless spending money on expensive computer systems if you have inefficient people operating them.
Now the municipality wants to go electronic and, like social welfare, sub-contract the billing system to Ithala Bank. Why not a prepaid system, which will remove the hassles of reading meters and sending out bills? But what will the municipal staff do? Electricity is the city’s cash cow. It should take care of it and not milk its citizens. THYAGARAJ MARKANDAN
Silverglen
PS: What can a customer do if there is a belief that the bill is incorrect? According to the eThekwini Municipality:
Check your readings with the readings on the bill.
If it is estimated charges, check that the volume used to estimate the charges correlate to the previous bill, where the daily average is recorded.
If there is high water consumption, check for a water leak.
If you believe that there is still a problem, contact the water and electricity departments to have the meters tested.
“The City processes in excess of a million bills per month. Of these, less than a thousand have been incorrect due to the cut over period when the systems changed, meter reading challenges and, in some instances, human error when capturing readings.”
How does the wrong billing happen?
“This happens when incorrect readings are being captured and get released before proper audit analysis can be finalised. This has been addressed with the various units to ensure staff are appropriately trained to correctly address the audit report produced by the system. It needs to be stated that this is not unique. It always happened, even in the old system, hence our concern that this hype is unfounded. We are dealing with these errors on a case by case basis.”
Billing queries can be directed to revline@durban. gov.za or 031 324 5000. Customers can send their electricity meter readings to custocare@elec.durban.gov.za, call 080 1313 011 or SMS 083 7000 819.