No sacred cows on electricity bills

While giving evidence before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Mines and Energy, Energy and Power Development Minister Elton Mangoma revealed that some highly placed people, commonly referred to as chefs, owed Zesa as much as $100 000 and were refusing to pay up.
“There are members of Cabinet who owe Zesa, there are senior members in the civil service who owe Zesa and there are MPs who owe Zesa,” he said.
The revelations by the minister are bound to anger ordinary Zimbabweans whose own individual debts to the parastatal pale into insignificance compared to the figures mentioned by the minister yet they have been switched off.
The announcement by the minister also brings into question the morality of Zesa continuing to cut off power to struggling households who owe a few hundreds of dollars while those owing hundreds of thousands of dollars continue to have uninterrupted power.
What makes it more painful is that the majority of ordinary people not paying the bills are doing so because they can genuinely not afford to pay as most have been earning below the poverty datum line since the introduction of the multiple currency system while the said chefs are probably flaunting their authority to avoid their responsibilities.
It’s not like the officials don’t have money. Most of them have businesses and are successful farmers.
They have a moral responsibility to pay up because they can not continue to be subsidised by the already struggling poor people or else Zesa must place a moratorium on all disconnections until money owed by these influential people is paid up.
Minister Mangoma said the parastatal would not hesitate to switch off the officials who owed the power utility money.
“We will be switching them off, this is a notice to them, there will be no sacred cows. That is the only way we will stop people from accumulating debts they can not pay,” he told the committee.
We have to say that Zesa management is partly to blame for the accumulation of these debts by the chefs. What were they thinking when they allowed the debts to balloon to more than $100 000 without taking any action?
On the other hand Zesa might argue that because these officials are influential people, it is difficult for its employees to gain access into their residences to cut off power. But we believe that there are other options which could have been used before the situation got out of control, such as initiating legal proceedings through the courts to get the money paid.
Unless Zesa collects all money owed by the chefs, its credibility is at stake. The power utility will surely be morally bankrupt if it continues to only target the poor for disconnections.