Pretoria - The legal wrangling between AfriForum and the City of Tshwane regarding the electricity prepaid smart meter contract awarded to Peu Capital Partners by the metro in 2013 is at an advanced stage.
Mayor Solly Msimanga this week shed light exclusively to the Pretoria News on the developments in the case raised by the civil rights organisation, which argued that the city had irregularly awarded the contract to Peu.
The contract was cancelled by the city in May last year on the basis that it was not financially viable.
Msimanga said the court would advise on the new court date, expected to be towards the end of the year.
He didn’t want to dwell on what happened during the previous administration under former mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa, saying he wanted to focus on finding a solution to the dispute.
“We don’t want this case to drag on for five more years. Remember we are still paying Peu and I want to get to the bottom of this. I want to put in smart meters and not the dumb meters that we have. And I want to make sure that we start billing people accurately,” he said.
He maintained the DA’s stance that the smart meter contract was illegal and shouldn't have been entered into in the first place.
According to Msimanga, the smart meter legal impasse had put the city in a Catch-22 situation.
“We don’t know whether we should procure the meters and go and install them, or whether to wait for this (the court case) to be finalised,” he said.
The mayor said the intention of his administration was to bring the matter to conclusion. “There has been a court date that has been mentioned and we did actually go to court to present the case.”
The matter had been under investigation by the public protector. Msimanga said the public protector report was something that the city was looking forward to to bring more clarity on the matter.
“I have engaged with the Peu directors to say that clearly this thing is not working; how do we then move from here,” he said.
Regarding the new smart meter contract that had been awarded, Msimanga said: “The new contract is also something that cannot happen because there is a court order to the effect of who gets paid for what. We still have the R950 million which is still kept in the holding account.”
Msimanga said by the time the case had ended it would be a case study on its own. “When you think you have reached an end, there is a new element that is coming in. I think professors will write a thesis on this one. I think everyone can appreciate that this is a complicated matter. It is a matter of cancelling a contract while you continue to pay for it,” he said.
He said the city was disadvantaged on how the contract was entered into.
Pretoria News