Eskom versus Soweto: The battle for power

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Residents say they cannot afford to pay their electricity bills, the utility says they must. Patrick Laurence reports.

Soweto, crucible of the resistance to white rule forged in the 1970s and 1980s, is the site of a new struggle of vital importance to the African National Congress government at local and even national level.

The main adversaries are Eskom, South Africa’s giant government-owned electricity utility, and the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC). But the ANC has intervened on the side of Eskom to establish itself as a participant in the conflict and to lay its prestige on the line.

Throughout most of last year the struggle pitted Eskom officials against Soweto volunteers operating under the broad aegis of the SECC. Eskom, seeking to recover the nearly R1 billion it said was owed by Soweto residents in unpaid electricity bills, sent in special squads to cut off electricity from households judged to be too deeply in arrears. The volunteers, armed with little more than knives, pliers and insulation tape or improvised insulators made from plastic bags, responded by reconnecting the targeted households.

The two sides clashed. On at least one occasion shots were fired. Eskom officials were reportedly wounded.

At the height of Eskom’s campaign to pressurise Soweto householders into paying their electricity bills the number of disconnections ran to tens of thousands. An SABC Special Assignment documentary put the accumulated total of disconnections at 58,000. A survey published in August last year by the Canadian-funded Municipal Services Project based at the University of the Witwatersrand found that more than 60 per cent of the households its researchers interviewed had experienced cut-offs in the past 12 months.

No immediate figures were available for illegal reconnections. Eskom was conducting an audit to determine the number of households receiving electricity unlawfully when Focus went to press. But, judging by the indefatigable energy of the volunteers and their entrepreneurial ingenuity, it was a not inconsiderable number.

Since last year’s running battles between Eskom employees and Soweto activists the struggle has entered a new phase. Eskom, backed by a range of government institutions, including the Ministries of Public Enterprises and Min-erals and Energy and the Johannesburg City Council, has launched an initiative to resolve the dispute. The Service Delivery Framework (SDF), its primary target area is Soweto, but its focus is broader than Soweto: it encompasses the West and East Rand and the Vaal, all of which contain large black townships founded by the previous government, as well as the mainly white affluent residential area of Sandton.

Figures quoted by Eskom show that resistance to payment is concentrated in Soweto – South Africa’s largest township – but not confined to it. While Soweto collectively owes Eskom R922 million, the total debt for the entire area is R1.3 million. That means that a debt of more than R370 million has accumulated in adjacent areas. Though volunteers working to neutralisecut-offs have not been as conspicuous in these areas as in Soweto, that could change. Operation Khanyisa or Light-Up, the SECC’s response to the severing of electricity supplies, might easily spread into townships across the Reef and in the Vaal without a positive plan to counter it. Clearly Eskom wants to pre-empt the spread of non-payment and direct action against its policy of cutting the supply of electricity to defaulters.

President Thabo Mbeki’s promise of free electricity made in the run up to the December 2000 local government elections complicates rather than clarifies the issue. The promised free 50/kWh per month covers a mere 10 per cent of the average monthly bill in Soweto, according to Municipal Services Project calculations. But nearly a third of Soweto residents believe that the pledge means either that all electricity will be supplied free of charge or that all arrears will be written off. By raising expectations, the promise may increase resentment, not mollify it.

There is another complication. Eskom has not yet begun to provide the free electricity quota to Soweto residents. Having established 13 pilot sites throughout South Africa to see how best to proceed, it plans to make recommendations to the cabinet in April on the provision of the free electricity to Soweto. Between now and the first flow of free electricity there is ample time for further misunderstanding, especially if Eskom reverts to “normal credit control” procedures against consumers who do not – or cannot – settle their current accounts and pay back the 50 per cent of their arrears.

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