If spaza shop owners are being warned, charged or shut down on the basis of the legality of their buildings, Ndlambe’s officials had better be confident that other structures within the municipality, including private homes, fully comply with its building regulations. The EFF’s Xolisa Runeli said this during a special council meeting on Tuesday November 26, where a report on unlicensed spaza shops was tabled. Meanwhile, a presentation the previous day about proposed new electricity tariffs had residents hot under the collar.
The process for town planning (zoning) applications and approval of building plans is lengthy and resource-intensive, making the 21-day compliance period announced by President Cyril Ramaphosa in his speech on the November 15 2024 impractical.
These are some of the concerns raised in the municipal manager’s report tabled at Tuesday’s special council meeting, titled ‘Illegal/ unlicensed spaza shops in Ndlambe Municipality’.
In addition, enforcing compliance requires significant resources and coordination across municipal departments and external stakeholders, the report notes.
“As it is, the municipality [lacks] resources and staff capacity to efficiently enforce municipal by-laws and ensure compliance of spaza shops.”
Officials had also met with considerable resistance both from shop owners and community members.
“The municipality has been enforcing the by-laws, however, there has been… lack of cooperation from shop owners and property owners.”
The presidential decree was also a focus of the Sarah Baartman Safer Festive Season Operations Ndlambe launch on Thursday, with health inspectors on the task force teams carrying out inspections at spaza shops, liquor outlets and on the streets.
Also tabled, for approval, was Ndlambe Municipality’s contingency plan for the festive season. Talk of the Town will report on this in next week’s edition.
Electricity tariffs
At Monday’s meeting, a resident of one of Ndlambe’s more affluent areas suggested they were not beyond protesting on the streets if the municipality proceeds with its new electricity tariffs and charges. Cost of supply analyst Hendrik Barnard, of Elexpert, had completed a presentation on Ndlambe Municipality’s new proposed electricity tariffs. This was the second scheduling of the public information session: the first, earlier this year, was aborted after a mass walkout led by the Port Alfred Ratepayers and Residents Association (PARRA).
On that occasion, PARRA member Lindsay Luppnow-Burrow flagged the lack of suitable audiovisual capacity for the size of the gathering in the Port Alfred Civic Centre. This time, there were three presentations, all held on the afternoon of Monday November 25 in a conference room at the Royal St Andrews Hotel. The fact that it was well equipped and comfortable did not assuage the fury of some solar power system owners, who believe the new tariff regime prejudices them.
The new fixed charges and tariffs for electricity consumers are based on installed capacity (a new factor) as well as time of use (using electricity at peak times is more expensive than non-peak times).
Small-scale embedded generation (SSEG) users are additionally encouraged to purchase smart meters that will enable excess power that they feed back into the grid to be measured and paid for.
Solar-powered residents at Monday’s meeting cried foul on several counts. Their objections included that:
- The rate paid by Ndlambe (80% of the price Eskom charges for non-peak use) and the fact that SSEG users could feed back only 20% of installed capacity into the grid would not make it worth their while to buy the smart meter;
- Not all SSEGs were equipped to feed power back into the grid and converting them to do so would be expensive;
- They disputed that the existing networks were equipped with wheeling capacity (wheeling is the delivery of energy from a generator to an end-user located in another area);
- One businessperson had installed extensive SSEG to keep his business going during severe, extended loadshedding. “I was forced to do that because of Eskom,” he said in Monday afternoon’s second session. He remonstrated that having compensated for the incompetence of one government-owned entity, he was strongly against ‘assisting’ another by providing ‘cheap’ power.
- Fixed charges and tariffs are based (among other factors) on the capacity a customer selects (20A, 30A or 60A) and some said it was unfair that SSEG customers would be required to increase their capacity from 20A to at least 30A.
Several business owners and ordinary residents, however, were positive about the prospect of bringing down their electricity bill, albeit over time.
The Port Alfred Ratepayers and Residents Association, which previously calculated that electricity customers in the Ndlambe Municipality could expect a 262.93% increase in capacity charges over the next two years, says its concerns remain. Talk of the Town will report on these further; meanwhile their latest update on the dispute, dated November 1, can be found on their website, parra.org.za
Responding to various questions, Barnard said that:
- The system to credit SSEG owners for energy useage would not kick in immediately – “just give us time”;
- Should a competitor arrive (for example, a windpower producer), a similar agreement to that negotiated in Stellenbosch could be put in place, i.e. that SSEG customers would have first right to feed energy into the local grid. “For the foreseeable future we will only buy from our own customers.” ;
- A ruling has yet to be made on solar systems that are not connected to the grid – “we need to see if they will be excluded”;
- Once a customer has bought the smart meter, it will be the responsibility of the municipality to install and maintain it;
Summarising the purpose of the new tariff regime, Barnard said it made the installation of solar systems very attractive for customers.
“We want you to manage your useage; we want you to go solar; and we want you to manage your capacity,” he said.
To help you determine what caqpacity you require, Barnard’s demonstration of the amount of power required for various household appliances is here:
https://ndlambe.gov.za/web/?p=10092
- This article was first published in Talk of the Town, November 28, 2024. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays.