91% of Jinja power sold to industries -Umeme
What you need to know:
- The Jinja area drives the economy in terms of usage, employment and can influence taxes and tariffs because it has the highest sales.
National power distributor Umeme has said 91 per cent of power in Jinja is sold to about 204 industries.
Mr Paul Sempiira, the Jinja Umeme operations manager, revealed during an engagement with security officials from Buikwe District and Busoga Sub-region intended to tackle power theft and vandalism of the company’s property.
“We sell 27 million units monthly to 43,700 customers across the Jinja area, but the industries, which are 204, are responsible for 91 per cent of the electricity sold,” he said.
He added: “The Jinja area drives the economy in terms of usage, employment and can influence taxes and tariffs because it has the highest sales. When Umeme pays taxes, most of it is collected from Jinja.”
Mr Sempiira also explained why customers receive different units of ‘Yaka’ for the same amount of money paid.
“At the beginning of the month, a customer is entitled to 15 units at Shs250 per unit- then every transaction made afterwards is charged Shs747 per unit,” he said, adding that each transaction attracts a tax of 18 percent [VAT], while a monthly service fee of about Shs3,600 is paid once.
Using an example of Shs10,000, Mr Sempiira explained that for their first monthly purchase, a customer will lose Shs1,800 to VAT and Shs3,600 as service fee, leaving Shs4,600 to get the customer 18.4 units at Shs250 per unit.
However, using the same example, if the same customer makes another purchase within the same month using the same amount, he or she would only be charged Shs1,800 for VAT, while the balance of Shs8,200 would give them 10.9 units at Shs747 per unit.
Ms Rose Oyela, the Umeme Kampala East regional manager, said the company loses 4 million units of electricity [monthly] -worth Shs2b- to power theft.
In Umeme’s demarcation, Kampala East comprises of Ntinda, Mukono, Lugazi/Buikwe, Kayunga and Jinja.
Ms Oyela added that the Electricity Connection Policy [ECP], launched by the government in 2018 to subsidize the initial connection costs, had resumed and currently, 5,628 new connections are pending in Jinja, while about 210,000 connections are waiting in the queue.
The policy had been suspended in December last year by the government over lack of funds.
Ms Florence Nsubuga, the Umeme chief operations officer, decried the theft of company transformers.
Ms Nsubuga noted that since its inception in 2005, Umeme has invested in 83 sub-stations across the country and transformers, adding that each sub-station, on average, costs between $2m and $4m.
“So, when any of these are destroyed, it is a cost faced by Umeme,” she said.
Last year, Umeme rolled out an operation dubbed Komboa [Swahili for redeem] to redeem its network from illegal users and operators.