Pretoria: Hours after disconnecting a business during the City of Tshwane’s aggressive disconnections campaign, some city officials reconnected the entity to the grid, for a bribe, Tshwane Mayor Randall Williams said.
“We are definitely going to do something about it. We disconnected people on Tuesday, but what officials didn’t know is that we had another team that went around to all the businesses that were disconnected and found that one of the businesses was reconnected the same evening,” Williams told news channel eNCA on Monday morning.
“Fortunately, we obtained video footage and we found it is two City of Tshwane officials that turned up with a Tshwane vehicle and got a bribe to reconnect the business. The business will be fines R641 000 for the illegal connection and the two officials will be fired for theft and bribery.”
Since last week, Williams has led an aggressive campaign to disconnect water and electricity supply to businesses, diplomatic missions and government departments that owe the city billions of rand in arrears.
Williams said the companies disconnected last week owed Tshwane R420 million.
“We managed to recover, by Friday, R148m but a number of companies are busy engaging with the city to make arrangements to pay,” said Williams.
Previously, Williams said many businesses in the capital city got away with not paying municipal bills for years because they would bribe the contractors assigned to disconnect services like water and electricity.
“They (businesses) would bribe contractors not to disconnect them or where they have been disconnected, they bribed them to reconnect them. So, we had to change the system. We have decided to have a more visual, in your face approach and go there and physically cut off,” said Williams.
“We have different people cutting, disconnecting our customers. At the moment, in the City of Tshwane, we only have 56% of our customers settling their monthly bill. We have 44%, and most of them who are able to pay are not willing to do so.”
The mayor said that even where there were disputes over billing, customers could not opt to just stop paying the municipality.
He added that Tshwane was now reading more than 85% of residents’ meters to avoid sending estimated bills.
IOL