MOBIPAY was chosen as the Windhoek Municipality’s prepaid electricity super-vendor because it was a subcontractor of Namibia Electronic Payment Terminals (NEPT) and is the only service provider with a tested system for buying prepaid electricity, the City of Windhoek claims.
Strategic Executive for Finance Roger Gertze said that despite there being other service providers similar to MobiPay, they were not involved in the pilot project which the CoW has been running with MobiPay for the last six months.According to Gertze, the reason for MobiPay’s selection as prepaid super-vendor is because it was one of the sub-contractors to NEPT for prepaid electricity sales before the CoW suspended NEPT’s contract. Because of this, and due to its involvement in the pilot project with the CoW for the past six months, MobiPay’s system had been tested and the Municipality was confident that it would be able to take over third party sales of prepaid electricity.Gertze said that other similar third party service providers were not considered despite their availability because their systems had not been involved in the pilot and their systems were as a result untested.When asked whether a tender process would be followed to allocate the vendor service to a third party service, Gertze said that the CoW is currently dealing with the crisis as a priority.All People’s Party (APP) President on Friday questioned the CoW’s motives for cancelling NEPT’s contract and awarding the third party service to MobiPay.MobiPay is a mobile payment service, and while it is free to register and set up a MobiPay account, a money transfer using the MobiPay website will cost the user N$2-50, and withdrawing money from the account will cost N$4-00 per transaction. The MobiPay website does however state that no client fee is charged for payments made to participating merchants.No mention is made on the MobiPay website with regard to interest earned on amounts paid into MobiPay accounts.The Namibian received reports on Friday that the MobiPay system had allegedly crashed due to the large volumes of traffic it was experiencing, but Amos Shiyuka, MobiPay part-owner, was quick to dismiss the reports. ‘Not at all, our system is not down, I have just now helped a client to register and buy electricity,’ Shiyuka said on Friday afternoon. The MobiPay Owner said that the long queues at the Windhoek Municipality had caused frustration amongst the city’s residents who had become increasingly impatient.’We are trying to help the people, we were also only brought in yesterday to help with the situation, but we have signed an agreement with Woermann Brock and people should be able to buy electricity from them in the next hour, so we are trying to make it more accessible,’ Shiyuka said.The Namibian also received reports from the public on Friday that the Municipality had run out of the prepaid electricity cards which residents now have to buy from the CoW. The Bizavend cards are manufactured by Cape Town based firm ADO Manufacturing, which has no operations in Namibia.CoW Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Niilo Taapopi on Friday could not confirm whether the CoW had in fact run out of the cards. ‘I have not been briefed on that by our guys,’ Taapopi said, as he also indicated that he had been caught up in meetings all day.The Windhoek Municipality sent out an SMS on Friday evening confirming that prepaid electricity could be purchased from Woermann Brock Shops in the city, and a press release to the same effect was issued by the supermarket chain.
