Don’t you hate paying for a service that can so easily be ripped away with little to no warning whatsoever? Eskom has become the posterchild for expensive services that only work half as efficiently as promised, so of course it would be raising the price of its service even higher for the 2021/2022 financial year.

Those tariffs are jumping by 15% this year, just in case you needed another reason to be annoyed at the utility while being stuck between a rock and a hard place because you still need to pay them.

Nersa (National Energy Regulator of South Africa) agreed this morning to Eskom’s tariff increase, which is far greater than it initially allowed. Yet since winning a case in the Pretoria High Court towards the end of last year, Eskom was permitted to push for an increase greater than the initial sum allowed by Nersa.

While one can argue that the tariff increase is exorbitant, everyone’s favourite power compamy is in serious debt and the new fees will reportedly bring in around R10 billion in revenue. Still, doesn’t feel great that the customers that have been screwed over for several years have to essentially bail out Eskom again.

Only you can help Eskom

Which isn’t entirely fair to Eskom. While the service provider has certainly stumbled and made plenty of mistakes over the years, there’s a large amount municipalities that owe billions to the power company. In a statement addressing the tariff increase, Eskom said that the tariff increase will assist with “recover(ing) prudently incurred costs for the production of electricity”.

Does this mean an end to load shedding? Most definitely not and power outages will likely still be announced a mere thirty minutes before they take place but hopefully this means those occurrences will be fewer. We’re trying to be optimistic here, can’t you let us have dreams?

Source: Moneyweb