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Zesa through its distribution subsidiary ZETDC has become very heavy-handed in its efforts to force municipal customers to pay their electricity bills by cutting off power to water pumping stations and making entire towns totally dry, except for a few fortunate rich with a borehole.
The two towns hit at the end of last week were Chinhoyi on Friday and Kariba on Saturday. Chinhoyi pumps from Manyame River.
Zinwa delivers the water using the river bed, rather than a pipeline, by opening the valves at Manyame or Mazvikadei Dams to release the required amount which the town then pumps up to its treatment works, which was also powerless on Friday.
Chinhoyi Municipality owes ZETDC close to $40 million, and while it claims ZETDC owes it a lot more it seems from what ZETDC says that this debt is the result of a misunderstanding over what the lease fees for the right of way ZETDC has for power lines with the High Court last month reportedly siding with ZETDC that this was a one-off charge, rather than a recurrent charge.
So until that judgement is reversed on appeal it stands and an offset of debts cannot be negotiated.
Kariba was hit on Saturday, with both its pump stations on the huge lake cut off and so a town sitting next to the largest body of raw water in Zimbabwe is totally dry, or will be when the last of the treated water in its reservoirs is used up.
Kariba Municipality owes almost $30 million, less than Chinhoyi, but still a lot.
Chinhoyi managed to work out a breathing space after the cut, with detailed discussions this week on the way forward, and presumably Kariba Municipality is now moving rapidly to see what it can do.
It is easy to understand Zesa’s frustration when major customers do not pay their bills. Unlike houses and small shops, who are now almost all on prepaid metres with no possibility of ever having an unpaid bill, the big customers in mining, industry, local government and presumably central Government and its agencies are on post-paid meters. In many, cases these major customers are not paying so much for energy, so many units a month, like the households, but instead pay on a complicated tariff that relies heavily on their maximum demand in power, so many kilowatts or megawatts, during a month.
This is done because power stations have to be built to cope with the maximum demand, and these sort of tariffs encourage the big users to spread their demand over 24 hours of each day.
You pay the same if you switch on for five minutes or if you run everything continuously for 24 hours, so energy costs fall dramatically if you go for the 24 hour option.
The biggest strike against Zesa when they hit local government by switching off a water pumps station or waterworks is that they are transferring the suffering from their customer, the municipal authority, to the people of the towns, and it is probably safe to assume that Chinhoyi and Kariba are not the only municipal owners of waterworks and pumps who owe ZETDC money.
There is already a Government directive to local authorities that they cannot disconnect water supplies to households to force residents to pay their rates and other municipal bills, including water bills.
They can take other action, including suing in court the delinquent residents and businesses but not cut the water. The reason was clear. Water supply is a health issue, not a convenience. Depriving households of their water opens the door to disease and epidemics as well as the obvious that people can die if they cannot drink. Councils can ration and can restrict flows to households, but they cannot let people die or fall ill.
The same argument must apply to Zesa, however tempting, it is to cut the power for the water abstraction, treatment and reticulation to stress the urgency of the need to pay bills, and Zesa needs the money urgently and on time.
It needs to buy coal for its thermal stations, it needs to pay for the spare parts for its maintenance to keep power stations running, and it needs to pay those foreign suppliers who supply Zimbabwe.
It also has to pay its staff, those who run the power stations and those who fix the faults.
But still the move was ill-considered and a better way to make municipal customers take the ZETDC bills very seriously must be found rather than risking national epidemics of cholera or other disease.
The underlying problem, of course, is the abject state of the finances in most municipalities. All of them, to some degree, are owed very large sums of money by their residents and resident businesses and few are taking this really seriously. Some even no longer send out bills and statements, with Harare being the worst example, and it can be very difficult to find out just how much you owe and how much you need to pay each month.
The days of regular monthly bills and the final warning of impending legal action when you were a month behind belong in the good old days when municipal councils were highly efficient and took pride in their efficiency, in their ability to set viable rates with ratepayer input, and made sure that they collected their money from everyone so they were fair. We complained, but we knew our neighbours were paying as well.
Few have any such pride any more and their councillors seem to seek election to obtain modest allowances and other perks with some wanting to go a bit further and add corruption envelopes to their personal income.
One problem is that the central Government cannot intervene legally very much in a municipal council. It took the declaration of a state of disaster for the Government to take over road maintenance, for example, from these semi-independent councils, and these days a commissioner can only be appointed when there are no councillors and that officer’s job is short term while new elections are in progress.
This is increasingly no longer viable. If those who owe money for rates owed the same for taxes then they would find out Zimra was definitely on their case and was collecting. If some of the financial shambles we see in municipal government was seen in central Government there would be some early retirements at best and a bit of overcrowding in our jails at worst, but the problem would be fixed.
But some intervention is now obviously required to ensure that Zesa can meet its bills without cutting off water supplies and plunging Zimbabwe into a health disaster, because there is no water, or into total darkness, because Zesa has no cash to run power stations.
Online Reporter