Staff Reporter
RESIDENTS of Katutura took to the streets to air their frustration about the alleged illegal blocking of prepaid meters and the use of a defective billing system by the City of Windhoek. They demanded that the City of Windhoek’s municipal council unblock all blocked meters within 48 hours.
The petition, handed over to the City of Windhoek’s municipality service centre in Katutura, was submitted by the Katutura Residents Committee.
“On June 3, 2024, in accordance with Electricity Act 4 of 2007, section 43 (6) of electricity regulations, we lodged a complaint about your illegal practice of blocking electricity meters for arrears on water bills, rates, and taxes. On June 29, 2024, the ECB issued a directive that this is an illegal practice and cited the same reasons we provided in our July 19, 2023, recommendations. Despite this directive, you continue to block meters illegally, affecting households, businesses, and churches that want to pay their municipal obligations. We are giving you 48 hours to stop this illegal practice and unblock all blocked meters. Failure to do so, we will encourage ratepayers to bypass all blocked meters using unemployed electricians, and we also want to tell you that even the electricians registered with you will be encouraged to do undercover business with the residents. No resident shall be penalized for standing up to an illegal practice by the C.O.W.,” said Shaun Gariseb from the Katutura Residents Committee.
He added that if the City of Windhoek takes action against those who unblocked their meters, they will mobilize legal action against such penalties collectively.
Furthermore, the petition demanded an audit of the City’s billing system, which has allegedly overcharged residents on several occasions.
“Unfortunately for the City of Windhoek, this is no longer a secret as you wanted to keep it. We want you, the CEO, to make an undertaking and commitment towards sanctioning a complete audit of the BCX system and not just a verification of information. The audit must provide access to the IT billing system to the auditors, not only documents availed by you. This system has been faulty for three years, and you knew it. This is confirmed in the documents we have seen, and even when you detected irregularities, you went ahead without stopping and continuously demanded money from residents, knowing it might be inaccurate, to the point that you even handed residents over to Red Force, which was illegally appointed without a resolution. Despite our demonstrations about the problems caused by this system, you devised more ways to extort money from ratepayers,” Gariseb said.
