By Blessings Kafwanka
All things being equal, ZESCO should have very minimal or no connection charges. That pole and cable used to connect you to the grid should be a cost to the company that will eventually help to increase their clientele base and revenue collection.
Two decades ago, mobile telecommunication companies in Zambia sold their SIM cards at an exorbitant price. In US dollars. Back then, not everyone could afford a SIM card, let alone a mobile phone. If you didn’t top-up for a week, your number would be blocked. You couldn’t make of receive calls. Your SIM Card was useless.
Things have changed. Provided your phone is on to receive calls, you’re safe. The price of a SIM card is now being sold for almost nothing. Why?? See, for the mobile telecoms to make money, they need to have as many subscribers as possible. If no new customers are connecting to their network, their revenue from the sale of talk-time, data and mobile money transactions charges will either remain static or plummet. Mobile telecoms have even gone a step further to start offloading very cheap phones locked to their network on the market just to broaden their clientele base.
They need everyone on board. From you, the bourgeoisie, reading this post on your sophisticated smartphone worth thousands kwachas to the street vendor who can only afford K50 for a feature phone. In fact, some of them are now selling smartphones locked to their network pa nkongole. The goal is probably to increase their revenues from the sale of data bundles.
Ordinarily, for every household that is connected to the grid, ZESCO should be making more money from the sale of electricity tokens. The more electricity tokens each household uses, the more money ZESCO makes.
So, how do you explain ZESCO’s motivation to hike connection charges instead of dropping or making them more affordable like mobile telecoms have done over the years? Instead of waiting for customers to apply for new connections, and having a backlog of applicants waiting for months to be connected to the grid, shouldn’t ZESCO be on the look-out for new customers?
How do you explain the company’s huge expenditure on TV/radio commercials encouraging their customers to minimize on the consumption of electricity? Lack of competition? Incompetence? Inherent inefficiency?
BK