Durban - Frustrated with steep tariff increases and inefficient delivery of services, the Westville Ratepayers’ Association (WRA) has lodged a dispute with the eThekwini Municipality, warning that its members will boycott payments until the matter is resolved.
The ratepayers’ association states, in a letter to the municipality, that the municipality failed to provide the organisation with a fair hearing before it imposed the new tariffs on July 1.
Chairperson of the WRA, Asad Gaffar, confirmed the letter, saying that they would withhold their payments and had set up an account where the money would be deposited. He said the contributed funds, meant for the payment of rates and services to the City, would not be handed over to the municipality until the dispute was settled.
The WRA indicated its next step following the handover of the letter.
“As such we formally advise the City that the ratepayers of Westville will not pay for any rates and services starting from July 1, 2023, until and unless the City engages with us,” the letter added.
The WRA detailed its concerns, which included that no public participation meeting with regard to the proposed tariff increases was held in Westville.
“When this was brought to the attention of the City, a general notice was sent out on May 18, 2023, for a meeting to be convened on May 24, giving the WRA three working days to attend this meeting. The WRA maintains that we have not been fully engaged and in our memorandum submitted to the City we made it clear that we would not be accepting any tariff increase unless this happened,” the letter stated.
The organisation said there were governance issues in the municipality that were costing the metro millions of rand in financial losses and these should be addressed before the municipality looked to extract more money from ratepayers. The organisation cited one of the reports by the Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) to illustrate its point.
“We refer to the MPAC report wherein it has been reported that R427 million in unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure had to be written off by this municipality and that this municipality is failing to take disciplinary action against those responsible,” said the WRA.
It claimed that millions of litres of water were lost daily, equating to billions of rand. “No effort is being made to address this except a higher water tariff.
“The WRA has been approached by other ratepayer associations that wish to join us in this campaign. We are hoping to avoid this extreme situation and are hopeful that the City takes our concerns seriously,” it said.
Other ratepayer organisations said they supported the action.
Ish Prahladh, of the eThekwini Ratepayers and Residents’ Association (Erra), said their members did not have the financial muscle to take the steps that had been taken by the WRA.
“We as the Erra have not stopped negotiating with eThekwini Municipality regarding the increase and how it’s going to affect the poorer communities.”
City councillors urged the metro to engage with the ratepayers to avoid a rates boycott.
ActionSA councillor Alan Beesley said the impacts of a rates boycott was serious. He called on the mayor and those in leadership to meet the WRA and to address their concerns.
EThekwini Municipality’s head of communications, Lindiwe Khuzwayo, said the City had listened to ratepayers during the budget hearings in terms of the difficulties they were experiencing during these tough economic times.
“Accordingly, we went back to the drawing board and reviewed all expenditure items. We cut and re-prioritised expenditure, where possible, in order to reduce the tariff increases. There were several meetings between the political and administrative leadership to reduce the tariff increases to the lowest possible levels,” said Khuzwayo.
She said the budget was a tough balancing act between ensuring the affordability of tariff increases for consumers and ensuring the financial sustainability of the municipality.
“We responded to the WRA during the budget consultation process. However, as the dispute has now been declared, we cannot comment further in public. Due process has to be followed. We thank our consumers for paying us and we encourage them to continue paying their accounts as failure to pay accounts attract interest and penalties.
“The municipality will continue implementing credit control measures where accounts are in arrears as we have to also pay the suppliers of the bulk services that we provide to customers,” she said.