Berhanu Regassa, 40, an employee of Awash Bank has been a loyal customer of the Legehar branch of digital service provider Lehulu, where he has been paying his monthly utility bills since the firm opened in 2013.

On July 4, 2019, he was at Lehulu to pay his bill. In fact, he had arrived before many of the other customers, but he still had to stand and wait in the midday sun for nearly an hour.

He travels from Lebu, on the outskirts of the capital where he lives and works, to the centre of the city to pay his bills.

The Legehar branch has 10 windows attended by clerks for utility payments and two desks assigned for traffic fines.

The recent experience of customers has been one of annoyance, frustration and standing in long queues in inclement weather trying to pay their bills.

They have to make multiple trips to the centre, and once they make it inside, they are often told that the bill cannot be processed, because the institutions have not issued it.

“I liked this place, because the service was fast enough that I never had to wait for more than half an hour,” Berhanu said, “but these days, especially in the last two months, the waiting time is more than an hour.”

Fortunewas at the Legehar branch on the Thursday when Berhanu was trying to make a payment along with hundreds of other people waiting in line.

Abay Gebreghiorgis, in his late sixties and working as a liaison officer at Petram Plc, was also at the payment office on his fourth attempt to pay a single bill.

The number of the customers at this branch started to grow, especially after the closure of a Lehulu branch at Mexico for the construction of the Ethiopian Electric Power headquarters building.

Kifya, an IT company established in 2010 with over 1,000 employees, launched Lehulu in 2013 as a public-private partnership between itself and Ethio telecom, Ethiopian Electric Power, Addis Abeba Water & Sewerage Authority and the then Ministry of Communications & Information Technology for the specific purpose of facilitating utility bill payments.

Operating under a three-and-a-half-year contract, the arrangement enabled clients to pay their electricity, water and telephone bills, as well as traffic penalties, in 40 branches - four each in Bahir Dar and Meqelle, and 32 branches in Addis Abeba. In the agreement, Kifya has to serve 1.4 million customers and can charge 2.56 Br for every transaction. Serving 950,000 customers, it was unable to recover its capital expenditure, according to Ahmed Mohammed, general manager for government e-services at Kifya Financial Technologies.

Lately, customers are unable to pay their electric and water bills at Lehulu branches offices, since the utility companies are not uploading the data to Lehulu computers on time, according to Qerealem Abeje, head of the Kifya Branch near the Post Office. Regularly, data for electricity bills have been uploaded to Lehulu computers every four days, while data for telephone and water bills are issued once a month.

“Disruption of this system has recently caused long delays and inconveniences for clients,” she said. “The transfer of data from the institutions to the new system causes the lag.”

The branch operates with four cashiers, as the fifth attendant apparently left the company for another job, afraid of being laid off when the office terminates its services.

On August 4, 2019, Lehulu will fully handover the project to government, which is planning to divert all utility payments and traffic fines to a new electronic platform launched by Commercial Bank of Ethiopia, and the institutions have entered into service agreements with CBE.

The payment options provided to each institution depend on the agreement, according to Belihu Takele, director of corporate communications at CBE.

The agreement signed with EEU is a direct debit option at the moment, while with the Addis Abeba Water & Sewerage Authority, the options are window-based, direct debit and CBE Birr. With a direct debit option, the customer must have an account at CBE.

Recently, an agreement was signed between CBE and the City’s Traffic Management Agency to launch the traffic penalty payment system using CBE Birr and window services at the Bank’s branches. The traffic penalty payment service was already provided by 32 centres of Lehulu and 10 district offices of the city.

“The program was designed to modernise traffic penalty payment to a paperless system,” said Dereje Fufa, vice president of CBE in charge of banking service.