Are you confused by your electricity bills recently? You’re not alone. Since the start of April, customers have been waking up to Eskom invoices that have morphed from a sort-of-understandable three- or four-line items a month to over a dozen tiny typewritten rows of cryptic statistics.

Most bills from the company now include an array of new charges for generation and access over and above the good old kilowatt-per-hour costs. Some are billed by the day, some at improbably low fractions of a cent. The bills are harder to read, and more expensive.