Niël Terblanché
Residents in a majority of towns in southern Namibia spent four hours last night without any electricity after the Namibia Power Corporation implemented stringent measures to collect an outstanding debt of over N$1 billion from defaulting customers.
Rosa Nikanor, the Corporate Communications Officer of NamPower, confirmed that the disconnection schedule went ahead as planned.
NamPower’s Managing Director, Simson Haulofu, announced early in May that the utility company will introduce a gradual disconnection schedule to two regional electricity distributors, one regional council and 19 local authorities across the country in order to incentivise defaulting customers to pay their outstanding debt.
Nikanor indicated that since the first announcement, some of the defaulting customers have made arrangements with the utility company to repay outstanding debt and the list shortened to 14 local authorities.
Residents of Rehoboth, Mariental, Karasburg, Aranos, Maltahohe, Gibeon, Bethanie, Tses, Koës, Leonardville, Berseba, Kalkrand, Stampriet, and Aroab in southern Namibia had to endure four hours of darkness.
NamPower’s initial plan was to cut the electricity supply from 11:00 to 15:00 but on Friday the national electricity supplier announced that power interruptions will commence at 17:00 and last until 21:00.
The interruption schedule will initially stop supply for four hours for one day of the week. In Stage 1, supply will be cut on a Monday. Every week that goes by without payment to the national utility company, an interruption day will be added until the schedule reaches Stage 7.
From Stage 8 onwards, two hours of electricity interruption will be added to each time period which at Stage 9 will leave Namibians without electricity for eight hours per day.
At the time of the first announcement, Haulofu said that a significant portion of the more than N$1 billion of outstanding debts has been overdue for a long time.
“The situation has concerned NamPower for a considerable time, and we had several interventions with various stakeholders in this regard. If this state of affairs is left without our further action, it will detrimentally affect our duty to supply electricity to the entire country on a sustainable basis. Despite past appeals to the customers with overdue accounts, very few are making an effort to settle their outstanding accounts,” he said.
Haulofu’s initial announcement defined defaulting customers as all those in breach of settlement terms as per the Power Supply Agreements as well as those who have defaulted on the extended settlement arrangements already in place.
