SAfm, Tuesday evening

You listening to the national pulse. South Africa's free basic electricity allowance is 50 kilowatt hours. Some campaigners are saying 350 kilowatt hours would be better. They say that'll expand access, reduce poverty and inequality. One of those is the Electricity for All campaign, and policy analyst for that campaign is Richard Worthington. Richard, good chatting to you. Thanks very much for joining us. Do we all get 50 kilowatt hours?

Electricity for free? Oh, no, John. Good afternoon. No. The law that was adopted in 2004, the Free Basic Electricity Act, provides that people who are registered as indigent are eligible to get free basic electricity. Now, in some distribution systems, you know, here we're talking about electricity, wires, the grid locally, city power, and

Job run directly by some municipalities, often by agents, and some of it done by Eskom. All of these areas, you get to register as indigent if you want to qualify for free basic electricity and then theoretically you should get it. Some of these distribution areas have said, well, give it to everybody, it's easier to administer. Trying to figure out who qualifies is too hard. I'm not sure how much that is happening, but it was happening in.

Some distribution areas. But even the over 10 million households who are acknowledged as eligible for free basic electricity, out of those, no more than 30% are actually receiving free basic electricity as paid for by the national treasury, because this is provided for in the national budget and then transferred to local municipalities, unless it's Eskom who's the distributor.

But it's still the municipality or the local government that has to decide who's on the indigent register, who's eligible. So that's money wasted, first of all. Before we get into anything, there, there seems to be money wasted here. Well, it's not that it's wasted, but it's used by the local government to pay for other things. Now, you know, how wasteful that is, that varies all over. But the point is, the Treasury transfers a whole bunch of money and it has acknowledged years ago already that most

Of that is not getting through in terms of being free basic electricity at the household level. Different distributors have done things slightly differently, and so some areas have provided a bit more than 50 kilowatt hours. But then, a lot of people who have been trying to get it have also found that the way that metering works is an obstacle, or how the indigence register is run by the local municipality. So, the implementation is known to be problematic, and we've had years of problems.