ZESA, which is also on the receiving end of Zimbabwe’s critical fuel shortages, demands that residents reporting faults should first buy 15 litres of fuel before the company’s employees can attend to their electric faults.
Fifteen litres of fuel cost Z$75 million on the city’s parallel market, the only place where it is available.
However, scores of residents who spoke to The Zimbabwean this week accused the power utility’s employees of diverting the fuel into their own personal errands, resulting in their faults taking days to be attended to.
Some even complained that their faults, reported about two weeks ago had still not been attended to on Monday morning.
“This is just fraud by ZESA. In the first place, it is not our duty to buy fuel for them and the 15 litres we buy is just too much as some of us stay near their offices. However, it seems that they do not care about this and they are abusing our fuel. I reported my fault before Christmas but it has still not yet been attended to even today and I am living in total darkness,” complained Dumisani Dube of Nketha 6.
The residents believe that the ZESA employees might be selling their fuel on the parallel market, or using it to run their personal errands instead of attending to their faults.
Some employees at the firm confirmed that they have had numerous complaints from members of the public whose faults would not have been attended to in time.
“It seems that some people in the company are taking residents for granted. We have several such complaints everyday but no one has ever been punished for that,” said an employee at ZESA.
Efforts to get a comment from ZESA officials proved fruitless, as our reporter was continuously told that the managers were out of office. – Bayethe Zitha
Post published in: News