Pretoria - The cost of living in the City of Tshwane is the second highest in the country when compared to other metropolitan municipalities.
And this, according to MMC for finance, Mare-Lise Fourie, was due to residents defaulting on their monthly rate payments.
“It has impacts on the ability of consumers to pay for their services,” Fourie said.
The failure by residents to cough up for municipal bills eventually crippled the city’s efforts to collect municipal bills, she said.
Fourie said the information regarding the high cost of living in the capital city was drawn from a recent report compiled for the National Treasury.
It entailed various household bills incurred by residents in different municipalities.
Household bills took into consideration the amount spent by residents for services such as property rates, sanitation, refuse removal, electricity and water
consumption. The report categorised the affordability of services according to the economic status of different residents.
For example, the middle income group, the affordable range and the indigent households were categorised separately.
The capital, according to the report, was the second most expensive metropolitan city after Cape Town in terms of cost of living.
Fourie said there was a slight difference between the two DA-run municipalities.
The City of Joburg was rated the third most expensive city in terms of the household expenses incurred by residents every month.
For the period 2017/18, it was projected that a household in the middle income category in Joburg would spend at least R 3 382.81 to pay their monthly services.
According to the National Treasury report, it cost less to live in the eThekwini municipality, with estimated household municipal bills for the middle income category amounting to R2 669.59.
Executive mayor Solly Msimanga remarked during his budget speech that it was “a known fact that the capital city is the most expensive municipality for a resident to live in”.
He said the DA-led administration would make life less expensive for consumers in the city.
Statistics South Africa spokesperson Lesedi Dibakwane said the poverty headcount in the city had declined by 0.1% from 4.2% in 2011, according to the measurement by Census 2011. “The unemployment rate for the city was 25.7% in the fourth quarter of 2016, Dibakwane added.
"This was slightly lower than the national unemployment rate of 26.5%,” Dibakwane said.
She added that a total of 1 269 000 people were employed in the metro during the last quarter of 2016.
This, according to Dibakwane, was 0.6% higher than during the corresponding quarter of 2015.
The information on whether the cost of living in the capital city was the most, or less, expensive compared to other metropolitan cities was not readily available.
Dibakwane said 439 000 people in the capital were unemployed.