Late yesterday afternoon I got a Big Shock. While I was at home there was a hoot at the gate and lo and behold, a Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (ZESA) meter reader had arrived to do an Actual reading rather than the usual Estimate.

I took the opportunity to ask him two (2) questions:

1) If I only get power between 8 or 9 at night until about 5am most days then surely my electricity bill shouldn’t go up, or stay the same, it should go down? He nodded his head in profuse agreement but said that ZESA seldom does actual readings so they continue to estimate useage and don’t take into account the fact, the sad, sad, fact that they supply very little power to home owners. In other words, every month, if ZESA doesn’t actually read your meter and do some accurate calculations, they’re robbing you and me, all of us, blind.

2) Why doesn’t ZESA publish a load shedding schedule so that we know when to plan to eat and all that stuff? Well the ZESA meter reader said that ZESA can’t vaguely guarantee any kind of regular supply and that the power deficit is so huge that they have to flip the switch Off at any given moment.

I said thanks a lot – its not his fault – and said see ya later. I watched him drive away, clutching his meter readings, in a brand spanking shiny new mini bus.

What sense does this make? This 15 seater mini-van hopping from house to house when ZESA should have a fleet of motor-cycles moving around our city, doing Actual meter readings.

This entry was posted on June 24th, 2010 at 11:57 am by Bev Clark and is filed under Economy, Governance, Reflections, Shortages and Inflation, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.