I still owe ZESA

Boy, is my neighbour steamed up! He is the kind of guy who regularly pays his bills on time, and always used to get that little note printed on his electricity bill “Thank you for keeping your account up to date”. However, loyalty to customers seems to be slipping into obscurity as far as ZESA (Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority) are concerned, as they try desperately to rake in every cent they can to save it from financial (zanupf – caused) ruin .

On 20th of October he got a phonecall from home, to say that ZESA had paid a visit and left a disconnection notice. Now that is something you don’t ignore in Zim. If they say you are going to be disconnected, you jump around – it can take many days to get re-connected. When he got home, he examined the document and found that in fact , he hadn’t paid his bill, so they were going to charge him not only what he owed – Z$5,300.00 – but a penalty of Z$3,000.00, and just for good measure, a re-connection fee of about Z$8,000.00! The trouble was – he had not received a bill from them for the outstanding amount.

Just to add insult to injury, he received his bill in yesterday’s post. The date of the bill was the 22nd September and the due date was 6th October. But the date on which the bill was posted? – 1st November – over 3 weeks AFTER it was due for payment!

I sympathise with him – I have my own billing problems with ZESA. Over the past month, I had a no less then seven bills from ZESA for the same account. This comes after not having received any bills for most of the past year. It seems that ZESA had a flaw in their billing system. Because sometimes they are unable to read meters, the system was designed in such a way that they could send out bills based on an estimated figure. They built in a “safety mechanism” that if the customer’s meter was not read within three months then the system would just stop billing until such time as the problem was resolved. That’s all very well if your meter readers do their job! However, when you have a disinterested bunch, they find any excuse not to do the job.

As a result, the system couldn’t bill the customer and ZESA could not disconnect the customer because the billing system did not see them as being in default. I tried to get around to the system by phoning in my meter readings but sadly, that didn’t work – my account was on the problems pile! Instead I resorted to making blind monthly payments so that I would not be in default when they finally caught up.

But now ZESA seem to have altered the system – they can produce as many estimated bills as they want and boy, are they going wild! I have had a veritable flood of bills. Not knowing that they were going to be more bills coming soon, I have been diligently paying each bill as it came.

I must say that ZESA is NOT my favourite supplier at this point in time – I am literally all billed out!

And – just to make matters worse – I still owe then more money!

Technorati Tags: ZESA, Zimbabwe, power cut, energy supply

This entry was posted by Dad on Friday, November 10th, 2006 at 9:43 am. You can follow any comments on this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.