By Isaac Salima:
Blantyre Water Board (BWB) has disclosed that it has lost about K8.8 billion it could have generated from its customers due to faulty prepaid meters the board started installing around 2017.
BWB recently announced that it was recalling prepaid meters from its customers, citing significant design flaws.
Speaking Tuesday in a Times Radio Kulinji Programme, BWB Director of Distribution and Commerce Verson Kafodya described the meter problem as a factory fault.
“A detailed study that we conducted on why our sales were going down indicated that it was because these prepaid meters had factory faults.
- Advertisement -
“We have over 31,000 prepaid meters out of which 7,652 were discovered to be faulty. Our calculations showed that we lost about 4.3 billion litres of water due to the problem,” Kafodya said.
He added that the exercise of recalling the meters is going on until the end of this month.
“After withdrawing the meters, we will have to study them and, where needed, we will have to import new ones to replace them,” he said.
BWB Chief Executive Officer Robert Hanjahanja said the board is not returning to post-paid meters.
- Advertisement -
- Advertisement -
“The meters were undercharging and overcharging our consumers. For instance, when one purchases a token of water worth K5,000, after consuming the volume, it was supposed to stop dispensing the water.
“But this was not the case, as it was going up to around K50,000, thereby affecting our revenue. That is why we had to make the decision of withdrawing them from customers,” Hanjahanja said.
Consumers Association of Malawi Executive Director John Kapito said they received several complaints from customers over the issue.
“The introduction of the prepaid meters was a win-win situation for both the consumers and BWB. This is because customers could plan in advance basing on the volumes of purchased water while the company was able to maximise its revenue.
“We also managed to deal with complaints that consumers had over high and unreasonable bills. However, this is sad because we are going back to those days,” Kapito said.
BWB, which has over 80,000 customers, introduced the prepaid system eight years ago to help in maximising revenue and dealing with complaints from customers over purported high bills.
