ZESA Holdings is owed $15 billion by both individuals and commercial and industrial customers, executive chairman Sydney Gata said on Friday last week.
Gata revealed this at the launch event for the power utility’s revenue assurance measures, where he also highlighted that ZESA was losing out significant potential revenue inflows due to illegal connections and primitive ways of billing. He said:
As it stands, ZESA is owed $15 billion by individuals and companies which is inhibiting the smooth flow of operations in the power utility.
Some corporate clients are not paying their bills and even others are engaging in energy theft.
… In 2020 alone we reported a 19 per cent system loss, against an international benchmark of only 10 per cent.
Also, there are still metering, billing and collections challenges across the country as 100 000 customers are still on load limit and post metering, that kind of metering allows to a lot of leakages.
Gata said ZESA is negotiating with Mozambique and Zambia over the supply of over 450 megawatts of supplementary electricity to complement the current limited generation in the country.
ZESA is anticipating a supply of 100 megawatts from Zambia Electricity Supply Corporation Limited (ZESCO) and 180 megawatts before Christmas from Mozambique’s Electricidade de Moçambique (EDM) and Cahorra Bassa. Gata said:
To meet the current electricity shortages we are not short of strategic responses, as we speak today, we are just about to finalise an agreement with Zambia’s ZESCO which will immediately deliver 100MW and 200MW in January that ought to give us some stability, we are also about to conclude an agreement with Cahorra Bassa in Mozambique to deliver 180MW before Christmas, so there it is some 500 megawatts that will be available and plans for that are now in an irreversible mode, they are going to happen.