Spare not inflaters of electricity bills

Electricity consumers queue to pay their bills at the Kenya Power offices in Nakuru town. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • By being accountable to everyone, Kenya Power is in real sense accountable to no one.
  • To guarantee fairness and ensure such deep-rooted mistakes don’t happen again, there is need to extend the probe to supervisors and re-billers.
  • I think the rot is much deeper and goes beyond the firm’s top bosses who are currently under detention for misdeeds at the utility company.

After being made to pay crazy electricity bills ranging between Sh20,000 to Sh54,000 per month for more than a year, I took a walk to Electricity House where I was directed to a desk that supposedly supervises those who supervise my area of residence.

The conversation with the officer in charge didn’t go well, but in the course I enquired what a customer who feels aggrieved should do. I also asked him what would happen if several reports of mistreatment of clients, poor supervision of meter readers and in fact everything that goes wrong at Kenya Power were made?

"Nothing. Just pay your bills," he retorted. It was my third such fruitless engagement in a span of two months at the utility firm’s premises.

In that simple statement the Kenya Power officer put his finger (or was it his mouth) on the sharpest theoretical check on the company’s considerable power, yet paradoxically their most effective shield against ever actually being held to account to anyone for their performance. As a monopoly, Kenya Power answers to its customers, and to virtually no one else.

EXORBITANT BILLING

This has left customers helpless, especially in the face of on-going exploitative and exorbitant billing.

People don’t have a way to track or police the firm except in the most general sense. Lack of alternatives to Kenya Power has worsened the problem.

By being accountable to everyone, Kenya Power is in real sense accountable to no one.

The anomalies at Electricity House are so entrenched that last month I received three electricity bills. The first one of Sh13,900 came on June 11, which I dully paid. Two days after settling the bill, I received another one of Sh8,945. The following day, on June 14, 2018 to be precise, Kenya Power capped the madness with another bill of Sh45,625.

No, I don’t run a posho mill or anything that can consume that much electricity. I live with my wife and eight months old son. Jacky, my able house help is not a live-in guest and the developer ensured that the place is fitted with the most modern-solar electric water heaters. Believe me, they even work when the sky is dark, meaning we don’t have to use electricity to heat water.

So where are these huge bills coming from?

CONSUMPTION HISTORY

While at Electricity House last week, one of the officers was gentle enough to take me through my consumption history.

Apparently, they had decided to backdate my billing-to more than one and half years’ ago, to cover some previous months they opined I had used electricity but did not pay.

Reason, the meter was faulty.

It is normal if there was no reading at all in the meter for the previous months billed because the house was empty then.

It is a new apartment, purchased from the developer, meaning I was the first tenant. I only started using electricity when I moved in. But the monopolists at Kenya Power want to hear none of this.

They have insisted I pay for the months the house was unoccupied.

UNDER DETENTION

That is extortionist. I think the rot is much deeper and goes beyond the firm’s top bosses who are currently under detention for misdeeds at the utility company. It seems some people have dug a huge hole at KPLC and consumers are being forced to pay for these mistakes.

To guarantee fairness and ensure such deep-rooted mistakes don’t happen again, there is need to extend the probe to supervisors and re-billers who unjustly insist on levying unfair costs on customers to cover their bosses’ misdeeds. This is willful negligence and conspiracy to commit felony.

It's an odd system. Kenya Power has a litany of employees with the authority to connect, disconnect and decide when and where to disburse electricity.

But unlike the police whose operations mirror that of Kenya Power, police chiefs must report to their bosses, county authorities or oversight commissions, and sometimes all three — Kenya Power officers labour under no real oversight at all. The meter readers wear badges but are, in fact, politicians.

MILLIONS OF SHILLINGS

They need not appear at a Board of Supervisors hearing or send the supervisors correct and unfettered reports unless they deem it in their interest to do so.

At the national level, Parliament and Treasury only get involved in Kenya Power’s budget, yet the utility company is afforded leeway to rack expenses on behalf of taxpayers, including millions of shillings in liabilities by procurement officers and directors through misdeeds.

That structure of an independently operating monopoly has been at the heart of KPLC’s quandary in the wake of the current arrests of its top bosses and should be re-looked for sanity to prevail in the company.

Mr Kwama is the head of communications at an international agency. [email protected].