City of Tshwane Municipality Deputy Mayor Eugene Modise has embarked on a community outreach programme to engage residents regarding, among other matters, the contentious billing system.
The first leg of the community outreach programme kicked off at the Atteridgeville Clinic in Mareka Street on Thursday and will cover all regions of Tshwane in due course.
“We have heard our people’s frustrations regarding estimated billings and now we are going to do real calculations and not estimations anymore,” said Modise.
“We have realised that the majority of our people here are indigents and we therefore want to help them register for the City’s Indigent Programme, however, we have realised that there is resistance from a component of the residents, like LASCA, who are resisting our efforts to help the indigent residents and are not assisting us, yet they call themselves leaders of civic movements,” lamented Modise.
“We are here in Atteridgeville because we want to be accessible to the residents,” he said.
Reacting to criticism that by using the clinic as one of the venues for the outreach programme “the municipality is actually ambushing the infirm, the sick and the elderly into making involuntary payment arrangements,” Modise said the following:
“We are using the clinic so that the residents must not struggle and use money for transport in order to access services like the one we are offering here today, we are using all the facilities of the municipality including the clinic to make sure we reach out to all residents.”
“All billing problems will be tackled on merit and yesterday we wrote off a debt of R289 000 which was owed by a certain lady, and she is now happy and encouraging all other residents with billing problems to approach the City so that we can help them,” he said.
He admitted that the most challenging issue is the refusal by residents to pay their accounts due to incorrect billing by the City of Tshwane.
Modise added that other issues which are tackled by municipal officials in terms of the community outreach programme include issues of incorrect billing, dysfunctional/ faulty meters, revenue and credit control as well as issues of estates belonging to deceased residents and registration into the Indigent Programme.
“We have child-headed households as the said households have been inherited by the surviving children who don’t have money to pay legal fees to transfer ownership of the households and also to pay for municipal services, but fortunately, we have lawyers from Tshwane University of Technology (TUT) who help residents for free to transfer ownership of their households,” explained Modise.
He said another critical service that was being offered included enrolling poor residents onto the City’s Indigent Programme as many residents who qualify for the programme don’t have the know-how to apply for it.
“This outreach programme will be conducted on a zone-by zone basis because if we tackle it in terms of regions, we won’t be able to reach as many people as possible because regions of Tshwane are very big,” he said.
He announced that the Metro’s monthly revenue collection stands at R3,6 billion at the moment but that the targeted R4 billion per month as envisaged by Mayor Dr Nasiphi Moya was realisable.
He said the Municipality’s debtors’ book stands at R30 billion and some of it will be claimed while the rest is impossible to claim because of the financial situation the debtors find themselves in.
Ward 62 Councillor in Atteridgeville Esther Masuku said she was happy that Modise, who also serves as MMC for Finance, has come to the area to experience the challenges that the community is going through, especially regarding the billing system.
“We are here to help residents explain as to why they are indebted to the Municipality regarding failure to pay services and this will enable them to get the necessary help from the Municipality,” she said.
“My advice to civic movements which encourage people not to pay their municipal bills is that we are not working on emotions or hearsay here but rely on legislations, and so they must come up with facts before urging the community not to pay their bills,” said Masuku.
According to Masuku, the money paid by residents to the Municipality will revert back to the community in terms of the establishment of Extended Public Works Programmes (EPWP) and general service delivery projects in the community.