Friday 6 October 2006, by PowerNell. Tanesco has recently discovered that some of its prepayment luku customers are being charged the monthly service charge more than once a month. This only concerns the customers who buy luku more than once a month and at different luku stations. This was announced today by Tanesco in a notice in The Citizen. In Tanzania domestic customers pay for their electricity on a prepaid basis. They have a meter at home for which they pay luku, a Kiswahili abbreviation for "lipa umeme kadri unavyotumia", which in English means "pay for electricity as you use" (source: Tanesco).

Recharge bill

 
On the Tanesco recharge bill there is always a certain amount of monthly service charge. Apparently this service charge is billed everytime you buy luku, even if you buy luku more than once a month. According to the notice Tanesco is working on the problem together with the South African supplier of the system, Actaris Measurement & System. Tanesco: "We request our customers to buy electricity token at the point of sale where they last purchased electricity token in order to avoid "double service charges". We shall notify you when this problem is sorted out so that you can continue to purchase electricity tokens at any point of sale. For those who have already been deducted service charges more than once within a month, they shall be informed the procedure to follow in getting a refund once this technical problem is rectified." The luku system exists since 1995. Unbelievable that it took eleven years to figure this out. And one is wondering what will happen if you buy luku only once a year. Will you have to pay the monthly service charge only once, then?

Note to Tanesco"s debtors

Not that this weblog is an outlet of Tanesco, but Tanesco also announced to take legal steps against "chronic deptors" with outstanding electricity bill payments. The Tanesco management gives them one-month notice to clear their outstanding debts. This was announced in The Express on September 28, 2006. By the way some Tanzanian companies suggested in the media that they have to pay their electricity bills even if they don"t get electricity from Tanesco. This sounded so odd to me that I hadn"t mentioned it before. Can anyone confirm these reports?
 
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