Pre-paid power to be shut down from tonight

Kenya Power will for the seventh time in the past one year shut down its prepaid system for maintenance.

An estimated 4.5 million Kenyans who are on the prepaid system will not be able to purchase power tokens from Tuesday at 11:00 pm to Wednesday at 6:00 pm.

They constitute over 55 per cent of the approximated 7 million power consumers as of this month.

The move is likely to have negative effects on its financial performance having contributed to a 63.7 per cent decline in net profit to Sh1.92 billion in the financial year ending 2018.

According to the power distributor, the shutdown is meant to facilitate migration of customer data from an old to a new hardware.

The data refers to customer details and all that comprises the prepaid system.

During the shutdown, prepaid customers will not be able to purchase tokens from Kenya Power’s banking halls, prepaid paybill number 888880 and through all other prepaid vending channels.

The shutdown will not affect customers on the postpaid service who are less than 3 million of all power consumers in the country.

In the last shut down in February, customers were not able to make online payments for their postpaid bills.

In October 2018, the power distributor had shut down the prepaid system to facilitate implementation of the new electricity tariffs.