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POWER utility Zesa Holdings is awaiting a new minister to decide whether it should also scrap off domestic consumers’ debts in the same way municipalities countrywide cancelled rate arrears, chief executive Engineer Josh Chifamba has said.Pressure has been mounting on Zesa from residents to follow the example of municipalities and also write off old debts.
The government ordered municipalities to write off the debts, saying people were over-burdened.
Outgoing Local Government, Rural and Urban Development Minister Dr Ignatius Chombo, who ordered municipalities to scrap off the debts, last month also queried the logic behind Zesa’s insistence on recovering the debts, most of them accrued before the country changed over to the multiple currency system in 2009.
“That’s the Zanu-PF thinking that Zesa and Zinwa should do the same on debts. How can you recover a seven-year-old debt? A debt was carried over, but what happened to the money that was in the banks before the adoption of the multi-currency regime?” Minister Chombo was quoted saying then.
Eng Chifamba said the power company had not taken a position on the issue, pending the appointment of a new Minister of Energy.
“I cannot answer that at the moment since we do not have a Minister,” he said, when asked whether the power utility was also considering scrapping off overdue power bills.
Zesa is owed in excess of $700 million by both domestic and commercial electricity consumers, with domestic users accounting for close to $300 million of the debt.
To counter the problem of defaulters, Zesa has embarked on a pre-paid metering system which allows consumers to pay in advance for electricity that they use.
The new system replaces the conventional billing system that had posed challenges to the power utility in terms of revenue collection while it is also expected to influence behavioural change on the part of consumers on the way they use electricity. – New Ziana
Online Reporter