Zesa Holdings should use more aggressive strategies to
recover an outstanding debt of more than $1 billion owed by consumers, Energy
and Power Development Minister Fortune Chasi has said.
“We must clear our debt and I have asked Zesa to be a bit
overzealous in terms of recovering the debt. Due to the ups and downs of the
exchange rate as a result of our macroeconomic situation, it just makes it very
difficult for them (Zesa) to be viable,” he said.
He, however, could not be drawn to disclose some of the
drastic measures Zesa was going to employ.
Late last year, Zesa’s subsidiary, the Zimbabwe Electricity
Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC), advised the market that it would
start disconnecting defaulters in a bid to recover an estimated $1,3 billion
owed by consumers.
The disconnections were primarily targeted at commercial
customers such as hotels, supermarkets, bakeries, shops and restaurants, among
others.
Minister Chasi said: “People should make payment plans with
Zesa or simply offset their outstanding debts because if they default for long,
it will just make life difficult for us all. So we are going to be a bit tough.
We have to work to get out of this situation and come up with a viable power
utility.”
He said non-payment of outstanding bills by consumers was severely
crippling the power company.
“Right now, people are enjoying uninterrupted power
supplies, but they need to understand that for us to have this stability, Zesa
must be liquid to import more power, including increasing its fleet of vehicles
to enable it to attend to faults on time,” he said.
It is believed that delays by consumers in paying their
bills was affecting Zesa’s efforts to make prompt payments for power imports
from neighbouring countries.
Zimbabwe imports power from Eskom in South Africa and
Mozambique’s Hydro Cahora Bassa (HCB) and Electricidade de Mocambique (EDM).
Last month, the country retired its US$33 million Eskom
debt and is now focusing on servicing the US$45 million debt to Mozambique.
“When it comes to offsetting our power importation debt, we
are looking at two issues where we are supposed to pay off HCB and EDM of
Mozambique, and we are making those efforts.
“We are already engaged in negotiations with a view of
paying them, as well as coming up with a position on how much power we can get
from them. We are working on building our foreign currency reserves so that we
pay out while negotiating with them (Mozambique power utilities),” said
Minister Chasi.
Government is also working on renewing the trilateral power
agreement that once existed between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
“There used to be trilateral agreement among Zimbabwe,
Mozambique and South Africa, which for some reason was allowed to expire. So,
we are making efforts to try and revisit that agreement because it assists us
from a pricing point of view and availability of power.”
The 30-year trilateral agreement signed in 1990 allows
Zimbabwe to negotiate for “firm and competitively priced” electricity from
Mozambique and South African power companies. Sunday Mail
0 comments:
Post a Comment