The year 2018 has been rough for consumers. Not that previous years were any better for citizens who make an honest living. The coming year could be harder. Service vendors look for every opportunity to exploit consumers. Rising debts, soaring cost of living and corruption are signs of hard times ahead.
Is there a reason consumers should pay parking fees at a supermarket? Or buy shopping bags from these retailers? Before the ban on polythene bags, retail outlets absorbed the cost of baggage. Is there a reason hospitals should charge parking fees? The longer the hospitals delay you due to their operational inefficiencies, the more they charge for parking. The sick are subsidising corporate inefficiencies.
You pay a standard parking fees of Sh200 when you visit the Kenya Revenue Authority Support Centre at the Railways Club. It does not matter how long you take at the service centre. Huduma Centres were supposed to make it easier for wananchi to get quick and efficient services. But consumers have to pay additional costs in trying to be responsible citizens. Only in Kenya do moneymakers get away with such exploitation.
Carnivore Restaurant may start collecting parking fee from its clients. Let’s hope they have not started crowd-thinning measures by the time this article is published.
Kenya Power, ever more interested in exploiting consumers, may start charging queueing fees when you visit Electricity House to complain about inflated bills. You are also paying for emergency calls to report regular power outages. With two or three ‘emergency’ lines, Kenya Power is operating in the dark recesses of prosecutable economic injustice.
Banks, the sharks of capitalism, may soon start charging their customers waiting fees in their banking halls. Sometimes you wait even when only half the counters are active. The sleeping giant, Nairobi City Water and Sewerage Company, will have to style up. The inherited ‘kanju mentality’ is undermining service and customer relations at NCWSC. Consumers suffer water rationing even in the middle of a storm.
ISO-certified Kenya Power is arguably the champion of corporate misgovernance. The monopoly power supplier has been fumbling throughout the year to disguise a crude attempt to force customers to subsidise fraud. Its attempts to wriggle out of scandalous electricity billing would have been comical if it weren’t fraudulent. Consider this: A consumer complains of an inflated December 2017 bill of Sh13,493, up from a monthly average of Sh2,500, with current reading recorded as 7,621kWh, up from 6,987. Estimated consumption is given as 634kWh.
After the complaint, the same customer got a bill of Sh105,089, dated January 12, 2018. The reading is given as 1,807kWh, similar to a previous reading of 1,807. Consumption is recorded as 0kWh, levies:0, taxes:24. Zero consumption is billed Sh91,596, more than a previous estimated, fraudulent reading of 634kWh. From the monthly average, it would take this consumer three and a half years, or 42 months, to consume power worth Sh105,089. Kenya Power wanted it at once, without justification.
Two readers, one meter, different results: One read 7,721kWh, another saw 1,807kWh. The consumer saw 1,873kWh two days after the second reading. How does an average monthly household power bill move from Sh2,300 to Sh18,000, or from Sh1,800 to Sh16,500? Or from Sh13,000 to Sh105,000? Denial of creative accounting at Kenya Power does not convince cynics. Incompetence does not explain the dearth of numeracy. It’s a scam executed at the expense of captive consumers.
The situation got murky after the Apollo Mboya case was withdrawn. Kenya Power was directed to resolve the billing crisis within a month, without disrupting power supply to aggrieved consumers. This has not happened, even as consumers plead for fair play.
Two months after the court directive, Kenya Power is still fumbling for wriggle room out of the conundrum. Meanwhile con debt collectors like one using the name ‘Engineer Charles Mogoka’ are taking advance of Kenya Power’s corporate gamble. A corporation that once enjoyed good public relation has fallen into an unprecedented management low.