The beleaguered Makana Municipality in Makhanda is in a race against time to recode more than 5,000 Eskom meters before Sunday.
The municipality and two other local authorities were red-flagged by the power utility during a parliamentary project oversight committee meeting in early November for the delayed implementation of the rollover project.
The recoding process, The Key Revision Number (KRN), or Token Identifier (TID) rollover programme, ensures prepaid meters roll over to a new global Token Identifier Code.
Last week, the Dispatch reported that 6,846 Eskom customers in Makana ran the risk of not being able to load electricity after the November 24 cut-off date because the municipality had not started the project.
The report had been tabled before the portfolio committee on co-operative governance, chaired by Dr Zweli Mkhize.
The committee had not received a report from the Makana municipality on why it had not started the rollover.
Makana spokesperson Anele Mjekula said this week the municipal vending system showed that there were 11,139 prepaid meters programmed and installed in the municipal area.
Mjekula said 9,691 meters had been coded to KRN2 and 1,448 meters were still on KRN1 with 4,381 meters flagged as “TID Not Purchasing.”
“The number of meters on KRN1 cannot be coded into KRN2 because they are old meters, and the municipality was phasing them out way before the announcement.
“This number will drastically be reduced once the physical auditing of the meters is done as some are no longer in the field, however, they still appear on the vending system because they were never removed when they were decommissioned.”
Multinational energy company Landis+Gyr was appointed by the National Treasury to implement the rollout of smart electricity meters in the Makana Municipality and was also commissioned to carry out the audit.
The company is also responsible for the TID rollover.
“The installation of meters by Landis+Gyr should address the audit of meters and their linkage to the system and therefore any meter not linked should be removed from the vending system and only the newly installed meters would reflect and in that way this will confirm the meters for Makana.
“The number of meters confirmed is 4,369, or 45.1%, as per the attached report from the service provider and 5,318, or 54.9%, are not yet confirmed as rolled over.”
Mjekula said the issue would also be resolved when the physical auditing of properties was done.
The DA caucus leader in the Makana council, Luvuyo Sizani, said an extension to the deadline might be requested.
“We need to remember the municipality does not go out and do these changes physically — they give out communication.
“The 4,000 people that have been recorded may not be accurate, there might be more people who have moved over to the new system and yet there are still a number of people that have not moved over because there’s no service provider that goes to the people — it must be the customer that does.
“There are a lot of people who have not moved over but communication is an ongoing process.
“We hope that Eskom will extend this deadline because [the delay] is not only from the municipality’s side.”
EFF PR councillor in Makana, Shampoo Carol Zwane said the chances of the municipality meeting the deadline were “very slim”.
“I think it is late now, you have many squatter camps that still use the old meters.
“We have about 40 of those. Chances are very slim to meet that deadline but we will see,” she said.
Makana was the only municipality in the Eastern Cape to receive a conditional grant from the National Treasury to help capacitate embattled municipalities drowning in debt and to roll out smart meters as part of the Eskom debt relief programme.
The municipality received R100m from the National Treasury, the most given to any SA municipality.
Throughout the last financial year, it had to scrape through its tight budget to pay off Eskom to avoid being disqualified on the power utility’s debt relief programme, which was effective from November 2023.
According to a report presented in the budget steering committee during the 2023/2024 financial year, the municipality could not pay R6.6m that was due to Eskom by May 31.
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