In stead of the 19 prepaid water meters that was supposed to be rolled over to the new vending system on Saturday in the Mangaung Metro, an error resulted in a massive 45 000 prepaid meters being rolled over.
More than a thousand of these meters displaying an error code leaving residents unable to buy water.
The city manager Sello More convened an urgent meeting this morning to address the challenges that residents encountered when upgrading their prepaid water meters over the weekend.
The plan was to start the roll over today, 4 November and the test went out early, but to a lot more residents than planned.
Qondile Khedama, spokesperson said in the newest press release that the update was given by the metro’s Chief Financial Officer, Zuziwe Thekisho on Monday.
“Out of the 1004 prepaid meters that received error tokens, 340 had a cellphone linked to the number and tokens could be sent to the users on Saturday. Another 750 did not have any contact numbers and councillors helped to assist with communication between residents an the municipality.”
Thekisho said as of last night, 70 of the 1004 meters were still not functioning and they asked the help of councillors to collect information about the customers. “Our tarket was to upgrade 19 meters on Saturday, but achieved more than a 1000 rollovers. This showed us that self-upgrade is possible,” he said on a positive note.
The metro’s Executive Mayor Gregory Nthatisi said that he is aware of the inconvenience that some of the members of the community went through as result of the prepaid rollover.
“Our mandate is to improve the system and this is exactly what we are doing for the community of Mangaung. We appologize for the temporary inconvenience,” Nthatisi said this afternoon.
Residents are encourage to do a self-upgrade by sending their meter number and contact numbers to the TID Rollover WhatsApp Line on 065-586-6261.
