Pretoria - Residents who continue to pay their municipal bills without failure could soon be incentivised for their honesty and faithfulness by the City of Tshwane.
All that is left is for Executive Mayor Stevens Mokgalapa to sell the idea to Finance MMC Mare-Lise Fourie and fellow politicians in council.
In an interview with the Pretoria News, Mokgalapa expressed confidence that awarding incentives to ratepayers was one of the innovative ways the City could employ to address the problem of non-payment.
He spoke on the back of news that the City's social spending for the 2019/20 financial year stood at R1.3billion. The amount would be used to alleviate the plight of poor residents, who can't afford to pay for utilities.
While he had taken “a moral ethical decision to get the haves subsidising the have-nots”, Mokgalapa said: “I have to get those billions somewhere back into our coffers.”
He believed the City needed to inculcate a new culture of payment and move away from non-payment for services.
“I think what we need to do is to incentivise people for payments. I still need to sit with the Finance MMC about it to look into how we could incentivise people who are paying,” Mokgalapa said.
He didn't say how he would like residents to be incentivised, but was concerned that the non-payment practice previously prevalent in the informal settlements was starting to happen among township residents as well.
He said the best way to eliminate illegal connections in informal settlements was to provide prepaid meters to households. The installation of meters would enable the municipality to get revenue from residents. “We are introducing the use of smart water and electricity meters so that we can deal with illegal connection.”