Our Electricity Vending System Is Still Faulty, Better Come To Our Branches – ZESA

ZETDC, the power utility company has issued a public statement regarding it’s prepaid electricity vending platform. The platform has been very unreliable for the last couple of weeks. Whether or not transactions go through has been a gamble.

ZESA says:

The Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company (ZETDC) would like to advise its valued customers countrywide that the Prepaid Electricity Vending System is experiencing technical challenges, resulting in some transactions taking longer periods to complete than is normally the case. The power utility further advises that the technical challenges are mostly affecting third party vendors of electricity and advises its valued customers to use alternative channels like their nearest ZETDC banking halls to transact until normal service is restored.

The notice is a tad too late but appreciated all the same. What would be appreciated more is the restoration of convenient payment channels soon.

The last time ZESA had a problem of this sort they said the reason was that Powertel (the ZESA subsidiary that manages the platform) did not have enough server capacity to push through high transaction volumes. Their solution at that time was to limit purchases via EcoCash to $10 minimum value per transaction saying that’s where the bulk of transactions occur.

Even after installing ,more server capacity, EcoCash transactions were then limited to a minimum of $5 per transaction to encourage people to do larger transactions less frequently. Other channels like Telecash are still allowed to do transactions of as low as $2 though.