Eskom in the North West said it is pleased with the progress it has made to recode electricity prepaid meter boxes in the North West, as 78% of their customers have completed the upgrades.
The utility’s remarks come as 24th Sunday is a deadline for customers to recode their meters, or risk being left in the dark.
Eskom stressed that failure to re-code on Sunday, will prevent customers from loading electricity tokens.
However, the utility’s spokesperson in the North West, Ezekiel Baruti, highlighted that there are those who haven’t yet upgraded their boxes for various reasons.
“Eskom has made things easy by registering them on the system.
The only thing they have to do is to get the twenty-digit number by purchasing electricity tokens,” said Baruti.
According to Eskom, the re-coding process affect approximately 6.9 million prepaid meters in their supplied areas nationally.
Baruti alleges that most of those who haven’t updated their meters are the ones using illegal electricity and those who have tempered with the meter boxes.
According to Eskom, affected meters are those still using KRN1 and those who fail to meet the deadline, will pay R12 000 to replace them.
Baruti emphasized that there will be no extension to the deadline.
“If it was in our powers, we would extend the deadline.
These meters were not manufactured by us and technology is forcing us to do the upgrades,” explained Baruti.
Meanwhile, Electricity Minister Dr Kgosientsho Ramokgopa, has defended Eskom’s efforts to communicate the deadline to the public, adding that they did a tremendous work in this regard the past 6-8 months.
This follows public outbursts that the deadline is too short, as thousands of people slept at some of Eskom’s offices in Soweto, to upgrade their meters.
Ramokgopa echoed Baruti’s sentiments, that the deadline is inevitable, and Eskom has
“It’s not extendable, that’s the point I want to make.
It’s a technical issue, we can’t extend it.
So, it’s a hard stop.
The 24th, if you have not re-coded, then you are sitting with a different problem.
So, if you replenish your units based on the obsolete system then you can’t load them
And you are sitting with another problem, is that now when we re-code there is no need for us to substitute the meter,” warned Ramokgopa.