To: The Honorable Minister of Electricity, NERSA, and the Eskom Board.

We, the undersigned citizens of South Africa, are begging you to stop the 8.76% electricity tariff hike set for April 1, 2026.

We are not economists. We are not corporations. We are ordinary South Africans, and we are sending you a clear message: Our wallets are empty. We cannot afford this.

You are asking us to pay more for a service that fails us daily. But more than that, you are asking us to choose between electricity and survival.

This hike will break us because:

• We are already drowning. Our salaries have not increased by 8.76%. But our food has. Our petrol has. Our school fees have. There is simply no money left at the end of the month. An extra R1500 or R300 on our electricity bill is not "inflation" to us, it is money we were going to use for bread, for medicine, or for taxi fare to work.
   
• We are paying for a product we don't receive. How can you charge us more for electricity when you turn it off every day? We spend thousands on generators and solar panels just to survive Eskom, and now you want to take even more of our income? This feels less like a tariff and more like a penalty for being poor.
   
• Small businesses are collapsing. The spaza shop on the corner, the hair salon, the small manufacturing plant, they are bleeding money. They pay for electricity they don't get, they pay for diesel to run generators, and now they have to pay higher rates too? They will close, and more people will lose their jobs. This hike doesn't just hurt households; it destroys livelihoods.

We demand that you:

1.    Scrap this increase immediately. Do not take money from struggling families on April 1st.

2.    Look at the numbers we live with. Come to our townships, our suburbs, and our rural villages. See how we live. Then tell us again that we have 8.76% extra to give.

3.    We have already paid for Eskom's failures, through years of load shedding, through money spent on generators, through lost business. Now that the lights are on, you want us to pay even more? No. Prove the system is fixed first. Then we can talk about tariffs

4.    We are not refusing to pay for electricity. We are refusing to pay more for less. We are ordinary citizens, and we have reached our limit.

5.    NERSA admitted these hikes are 'unbearable' for households but approved them anyway as the 'bare minimum' for Eskom's survival . We say: the burden should not fall on struggling families. Scrap this increase!

Sincerely,

South African Citiziens