FRIDAY, 20 NOVEMBER 2020: Over the past two days, Eskom has been auditing customer meters in the
towns of Bohlokong and Thabong in the Free State. Electricity theft is
rife in these two areas and not only overloads the networks but also endangers
the lives of adults and children in the communities.
Meter audits were done in Bohlokong outside Bethlehem on Thursday, 19 November 2020. In
Bohlokong near Bethlehem there is a strong indication of ghost vending in the
area. Ghost vending is the illegal buying and selling of prepaid
electricity vouchers. These vouchers are illegal because the money paid
goes to the syndicates and not to Eskom who needs the revenue to maintain the
electricity networks. Previous audits indicated that some of these homes have
not bought any electricity over the past three months but are still consuming
power.
During the audits in Thabong, this customer meter was found with 1 490 units although the customer only bought electricity worth R50. In
Thabong near Welkom, Eskom has found a large number of households that have
bought zero units of electricity over the past few months. A major issue
in Thabong is the bypassing of electricity meters, which means that the meters
register very little of the electricity consumed or none at all. Eskom
picks this up by monitoring consumption in areas and then comparing electricity
sales to the amount of electricity consumed in the area.
Says
Lucas Mazibuko, Senior Manager Maintenance and Operations for Eskom in the Free
State: “In Bohlokong, there is one transformer close to exploding due to
overloading and in Thabong there are two transformers being overloaded.
Replacing a transformer costs on average R80 000, which takes away funding
from other critical maintenance on the networks.”
“Eskom
has empathy for the many people suffering financially in these difficult
times. As such, we are educating communities on how they could apply for
Free Basic Electricity (FBE) with their local municipalities and we share
energy saving tips on various media platforms. Unfortunately, Eskom
cannot afford to keep the lights burning while millions of customers are not
paying and others are damaging infrastructure,” Lucas concludes.