Desperate Soweto residents plan to sleep outside Eskom service centres in bid to update electricity meters before deadline
Sunday is the deadline for updating prepaid electricity meters, thereafter customers won’t be able to use the current meters to load units.
A Johannesburg City Power smart meter. Picture: File
JOHANNESBURG - Eskom service centres in Soweto have officially closed for the day while hundreds of customers who are desperate to update their meters wait in snaking queues.
Sunday is the deadline for updating prepaid electricity meters, thereafter customers won’t be able to use the current meters to load units.
Prepaid customers started queuing as early as 3am on Wednesday morning, determined to avoid the R12,000 cost of replacing their meters if they fail to upgrade on time.
On Wednesday afternoon, Eskom’s Zola, Pimville, and Mapetla centres began turning away customers at 4:30pm, promising to resume assisted updates on Thursday morning. However, queueing residents said they would spend the night outside the centres if they had to.
A suggestion from the customers is that Thursday's queue starts with tickets issued on Wednesday but were not attended but many remain apprehensive, worried that the centres won’t be able to cope with the sheer volume of demand.
At the Zola hub, more than 1,200 tickets were issued on Wednesday alone.
Customers fear that even with the system in place, many will still miss the deadline.
"They will begin processing tickets from the last one attended to today," one customer said.
"Those who want to sleep here can, we don’t know. But we will secure our spots using the numbers they gave us," another customer said.
Meanwhile, Eskom spokesperson, Daphney Mokoena, assured EWN that their systems were equipped to handle the high demand, adding that all qualifying customers would be served before the Sunday deadline.
Back in Zola, however, the snaking queues show no sign of shrinking despite Wednesday’s closure, as residents grow increasingly desperate.