Update: No online purchases of electricity
Prepaid electricity for the entire Steve Tshwete area still cannot be purchased online or through the FNB app - despite more than 65 towns throughout Mpumalanga providing the service. And the community really wants it.
Public frustrations have been at an all time high for the past 10 days following the initial collapse and restoration of electricity paypoints all over town.
This resulted in long queues when the service was online, only for most paypoints to go offline again. It meant only a handful of service stations were able to sell prepaid electricity to consumers.
The community has vented its anger at the lack of an online service which would be ideal in most circumstances, especially when paypoints collapse.
Municipal Manager, Mandla Mnguni, said this week that the municipality has not ruled out the possibility of providing an online service and are in the process of investigating a solution that would suite them.
“We want to implement a system that would help us preserve the collection of rates and taxes, which at the moment is worked into the electricity bill. Consumers in other towns pay the bill directly to Eskom and thereby fail to collect rates and taxes. We don’t want to be in that situation”.
Mr Mnguni agreed that an online service was urgently needed for purposes of both convenience and reliability.
“We cannot give a time frame as to when we can implement this service, but we do realise the importance of getting an online system up and running as soon as possible,” he said.
Read previous stories here:
Update: Paypoints start going online
Prepaid electricity paypoints go offline
