City of Johannesburg changes tune over R200 prepaid electricity surcharge

Councils have to recover their costs. If it is unpopular to charge for availability (as ERA and various papers dictate using cost of supply), then they will have to get it in the energy fee per kWh. If that also is politically unpopular, then they will hike rates & taxes. The end game is going to be that national revenue is allocated to councils to increase the scale of subsidized / free services. So free water & electricity for households under R10,000 per month. They won’t get that revenue from a 17.5% VAT rate, so it will have to come from income taxes.

Well he said that the matter will be reviewed. That doesn't mean anything other than that they'll look at it. "We have reviewed the matter, and taking into account aspects like changes to the City's computer systems, we have, with sorrow in our hearts and tears in our eyes, in full cogniscance of the plight of the City's poorest, decided that the fee will have to stay in place for at least this budget cycle. We would like to remind the opposition parties that have made the most noise that they tried to introduce the exact same fee when they or their leaders were running the City in 2019, and ask them to not play politics but to look at the realities of the situation."

Well he said that the matter will be reviewed. That doesn't mean anything other than that they'll look at it. "We have reviewed the matter, and taking into account aspects like changes to the City's computer systems, we have, with sorrow in our hearts and tears in our eyes, in full cogniscance of the plight of the City's poorest, decided that the fee will have to stay in place for at least this budget cycle. We would like to remind the opposition parties that have made the most noise that they tried to introduce the exact same fee when they or their leaders were running the City in 2019, and ask them to not play politics but to look at the realities of the situation."

Sounds to me rather that what is needed in Johannesburg is that the municipality should get control over the occurance of non-payment among customers. That seems to me the root cause for all this. Part of getting control over this is to change the budget to ensure that what people are supposed to pay is affordable to them. And then, after that, proper enforcement of the tariffs should happen. But to increase the costs of those who pay, such as putting the extra burden of R200 onto them, will be a disaster - many of those who are paying will only be forced into also becoming non-payers, making the problem worse.

Of course the populists will change their tune. That’s how they operate.

It is my experience in KZN that the prepaid electricity tariff per kwh is 50% higher than postpaid tariffs in order to cover the availability costs etc. If this is also the case in JHB, then there should be no reason to add an additional availability fee to prepaid electricity

Why can't use the same model as the fuel levy, a fraction of the cost per Kw of electricity goes towards the fund prepaid or else. Unless the model was skewed for the cost to be borne by postpaid customers

I find is very strange that taxpayers are forced to invest in a business like Eskom, then when it is privatized it flows into private hands and the taxpayers are not themselves shareholders. Even as a kid this puzzled me as in Zimbabwe, there was a "levy" included in every monthly electricity bill, then when the version of Eskom there had parts of it privatized the investors got diddly. Same will happen here.

Why treat pre paid and post paid customers differently? All users should be treated and charged equally. Should the R200 pre paid levy be discarded, post paying customers’ levy must be discarded as well.

I keep hearing about the impact on the poor who seem to be getting lots of airtime. The tax paying middle class are broke. We have reduced or valued household helper to every 2 weeks from every week. Keeping passing on the ills of bad government onto the middle class will have devastating effects. Middle class is the lifeblood of SA.

1. Until CoJ starts managing all functions in the city properly, as well as corruption, they will not have the credibility to assure ratepayers and residents that they are acting in good faith and not trying to paper over their poor management practices and/or even worse, fill up the emptying pot for more theft when they propose tariffs like this. 2. They should start with the tough stuff that ANC administrations have been notorious for ducking for years; collecting arrears, fixing potholes and water and sewer leaks, rubbish removal and cleaning Stormwater networks and, together with SAPS and CPFs, dealing with neighbourhood crime. 3. The last point will help deal with one of 3 excuses used by municipal and SOE officials not to fix things, namely that it is too dangerous for them in the townships and suburbs to go out without security escorts. It is getting too expensive to get sufficient security so staff increasingly just sit in their depots; 4. One of the other excuses is lack of funds. This is partly the result of many years of SALGA and SAMWU achieving above average pay increases to the extent their remuneration is generally 2 X that if the private sector. This suggests there can only be half the amount of staff to do the same work as the private sector. In fact some municipal departments are outsourcing 70% of the work to tenders. 5. And this leads to the 3rd excuse, the tendering process. Municipalities resort to private/community based contractors to do the work they can no longer do. Because these tenders are vulnerable to corruption they have increasingly more onerous conditions that result in them taking longer and longer to award, sometimes if at all. In the words of Tim Cohen, a clusterf&@k! - with apologies to Richard Poplak. To finish off with Clem Sunter, let the fox be with all of us!

1. Until CoJ starts managing all functions in the city properly, as well as corruption, they will not have the credibility to assure ratepayers and residents that they are acting in good faith and not trying to paper over their poor management practices and/or even worse, fill up the emptying pot for more theft when they propose tariffs like this. 2. They should start with the tough stuff that ANC administrations have been notorious for ducking for years; collecting arrears, fixing potholes and water and sewer leaks, rubbish removal and cleaning Stormwater networks and, together with SAPS and CPFs, dealing with neighbourhood crime. 3. The last point will help deal with one of 3 excuses used by municipal and SOE officials not to fix things, namely that it is too dangerous for them in the townships and suburbs to go out without security escorts. It is getting too expensive to get sufficient security so staff increasingly just sit in their depots; 4. One of the other excuses is lack of funds. This is partly the result of many years of SALGA and SAMWU achieving above average pay increases to the extent their remuneration is generally 2 X that if the private sector. This suggests there can only be half the amount of staff to do the same work as the private sector. In fact some municipal departments are outsourcing 70% of the work to tenders. 5. And this leads to the 3rd excuse, the tendering process. Municipalities resort to private/community based contractors to do the work they can no longer do. Because these tenders are vulnerable to corruption they have increasingly more onerous conditions that result in them taking longer and longer to award, sometimes if at all. In the words of Tim Cohen, a clusterf&@k! - with apologies to Richard Poplak. To finish off with Clem Sunter, let the fox be with all of us!

All that remains is to vote Gwamanda out at the earliest opportunity.

While several commenters do, it would be good if everyone paid attention and respected the correct terminology, specifically the standard unit of electrical energy consumption. The correct unit is “kWh” (1 kWh = 3,600,000 J = 3.6 MJ). It isn’t “kW,” “kwh,” “Kw,” or any other funny concoction of letters and cases. There’s a very good reason why the units are written in a specific way, and why writing them differently is flatly wrong. Ask a physicist or an engineer to explain why.

Eskom is owed R78 billion by municipalities; and there is "no possibility under the sun" that the power utility will recover it - as per Energy and Electricity Minister, Kgosientsho Ramokgopa.

In Cape Town prepaid clients now pay R281,78 for electricity and R155,87 for water availability as a "home user charge". There has been no reduction in the rates that, I assumed, previously incorporated these charges.

The MMC for Finance for the Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, Dada Morero, admitted that these surcharges of R200 per month per customer have been part of the current post-paid customer's accounts for a few years now. When will these surcharge amounts be refunded to the post-paid customers???