City Of Johannesburg Utility Payment Systems Shut Down

This message came through our community WhatsApp group this morning posted by one of the City of Johannesburg local Councilors. There has been no information directly from the City of Johannesburg because obviously they would like the revenue to still keep being paid. The COJ like the majority of municipalities around the country are neck deep in debt due to corruption and theft.

I know quite a few people in our road who have had some crazy electricity bills of late and last month we received a billing that made no sense what so ever. One household was being charged 4 x the amount they should have been and were disconnected. From my understanding we were over charged by around R16 000 for the 3 month period which is around $1K. We have solar so we do not use much from the grid and why the utility bill was so confusing as our consumption does not match the consumption they are saying we are using. My solar app shows exactly how many kwh flows through our system from the grid so I have a rough figure on my head of a realistic number. No wonder they hate solar users so much as we can call them out when we know they are short cutting the system and not doing their jobs.

My guess is they have not come and physically checked the meters and are charging a rate on average with other houses in the area. I will be contesting the bill, but after reading this message there is little chance of getting this sorted under these circumstances and I will have to wait until next week. At these times I wish I was fully off the grid as dealing with this is time consuming

The joys of phoning a South African government office is what I am dreading as I know this could take anywhere between 30 minutes or much longer for the call to be answered. Last time I was in the queue for 40 minutes and the call was cut and ended up visiting the offices instead. The problem is where the COJ offices are situated is a rather dodgy area with many people just hanging around for no real reason. I don't often have to go on full alert mode and would rather avoid this if possible. I am sure there will be longer delays than normal due to the scale of this problem and everyone will be querying their bills.

The biggest problem is the standard of person you are having to deal with and why very little ever gets achieved and can take multiple visits. The last problem I had took over 4 years to be fixed and that was an electricity meter that had not been fully connected. We scored big with this, but was never intentional and the fault was down to a job being half completed by one of their contractors. The funny thing is when you are sitting in line you can see the booths that are empty with someone who should be helping clients looking very busy doing some thing else and it is like they do x amount of people per hour and no more. The fear looks like if they do too much work maybe they would be expected to do that daily and there is no chance that is going to happen.

Posted Using INLEO