Rundu
The Kavango Regional Council (KRC) that administers the two Kavango regions has refused to sign the Nored service delivery agreement, which will allow the company to continue supplying electricity to the two regions.
The agreement was to be signed on Monday by regional and town councils in Kunene, Oshana, Omusati, Ohangwena, Zambezi and the two Kavangos.
All the other regions signed the agreement for Nored (Northern Regional Electricity Distribution Company) to continue supplying electricity and maintenance, except the KRC. KRC chairperson Bonny Wakudumo, who spoke to New Era on the sidelines of the signing ceremony, said the council was not clear on the agreement and still needed time to go through it.
“In fact it’s not a very big issue, to us it’s a matter of principle. Nored came here and engaged us in discussions but as we went through the documents we discovered that some things weren’t clear. We posed queries to them but they could not answer our questions so we said to them, for us to commit the two regions as well as Nkurenkuru and Rundu town councils to that signing we need to first go thoroughly through the documents to ascertain the content.
We want to see how it will affect our people including our rural people from the grassroots and once we are satisfied then we will sign,” Wakudumo said.
“They are saying this is a service agreement but apart from the service agreement there is also one service that is running parallel with this one in terms of shares. We are shareholders within Nored and our concern is, on which basis does Nored allocate their shares to shareholders, what is the basis? Is it at random – do we just say okay each regional council should get shares or are we saying it’s based on what we bring to the Nored coffers? So those are the things we need to understand because if the two regions are bringing a lot of money to Nored, we believe we should get more shares in return. We cannot just say because we are all regions then we should be treated equally. So that is the bone of contention we want to satisfy ourselves with.
“As you know we have a lot of green schemes here and power utilization is very high so we believe that in terms of revenue we are contributing a lot to Nored so that is what we want to find out,” he said.
Currently the regional councils and town councils share the dividend that they get from Nored as shareholders and they divide it 50/50.
However all the other regional councils and town councils in the Nored sphere of operation signed the agreement.