Buying my dream home, aka "worst case ever" - part four

The utilities fiasco reloaded: electricity

Soon after I moved in, I went and applied for prepaid electricity but despite returning regularly to ask about it, I got no feedback from the City Power planner. I quickly realised is that the City of Johannesburg computer systems are frequently offline, often for days at a time. There were many wasted visits to the customer service centres because of this.

One day when they were offline yet again, I was told to go directly to the City Power offices to see what was happening. I was informed us that the planner 'couldn't understand the application' and that we had to go and see her. The planner advised that although the property is a sectional title (communal property), we were entitled to separate water and electrical connections because we each received separate rates bills, but that we would have to do the application as a collective and probably pay to have a new connection point installed. There was one problem with this: the person who wasn't paying the water bill had illegally bypassed the council supply point years before and installed prepaid electricity and wasn't going to play ball. Although the planner said that this illegal connection would be cut, it wasn't done but we proceeded with the application without her. Once we had paid, she sent the inspector out who informed us that he expected us to install a new main power supply cable to each house and move the meter box before he would authorise installation. He negotiated with the owner of the illegal electrical connection, telling her that the cables were to be moved and the meter would be installed outside in the box instead of in her kitchen. She agreed to this.

My house is furthest from the road and it cost a fortune to get the new cables laid. When the electrician arrived to dig a trench for the cables, the woman with the illegal meter proceeded to obstruct us in every way she could, starting screaming matches in the street and claiming that the electrician wasn't allowed to dig next to her house and denying access to her property. In the meantime, she was reneging on her promises to pay off her arrears. This meant that time was of the essence if we were to get prepaid electricity installed before we were all cut off again except for her, because she had bypassed the mains. I had to keep threatening to sue her to keep her paying. There were many shouting matches and rude emails exchanged.

Eventually the installation was ready and connected. City Power was called and they replied that they were out of stock of meters and couldn't say when they would have more. And so the situation dragged on for a few more months, with more fights to keep the neighbour paying. Eventually, new stock arrived but there was still no installation. When I phoned for the umpteenth time to ask what was going on I was told that the planner had done our application incorrectly and we needed to get new reference numbers linked to our individual rates accounts. We rushed to the council and for once, it was done speedily and within a week, contractors arrived to install the meters. I breathed a huge sigh of relief because now we could no longer have our electricity cut because of other people’s non-payment. The next month, I noticed that we had continued to be billed as if we were still using post-paid electricity. I logged a query immediately but nothing was done about it, even though I soon received an email acknowledging that we were now on pre-paid. They continued to bill us for another 11 months before I finally found a way to make it stop. I have yet to get them to reverse those charges.

Next installment: the water problem