They can't account for it.
Homeowners, property developers and landlords are paying billions of rands to 280 councils every month and not one of these organisations can properly account for the money they have received or spent.
At least that's what the Auditor-General's report found last week when it revealed that just three – of the 283 local authorities – had received a clean, unqualified audit. All the rest of them had not complied with, nor met, the basic accounting standards laid down by law. And, worse still, they were unable to provide the necessary detail required by the Auditor-General.
Rightly or wrongly, money is the lifeblood of the economy and, as ratepayers, we all work hard to earn what cash we can and we strive to spend as little of it as possible or to spend it on the essential services that are needed to keep a property comfortable, habitable and clean. Services such as refuse removal, electricity supplies, water and sanitation.
And we pay for these services at ever-escalating levels every month. It is us, the ratepayers who are the lifeblood of the municipal economy. We are part of the River of Cash and our money flows into the councils and out of it in a never-ending stream of expenditure.
Among us there are the occasional defaulters who run up accounts and then run for the hills leaving the bills unpaid. But they are the exception rather than the rule.
There are others who are slow payers, shell out the minimum amount possible to keep services functioning. There are even those who make a financial arrangement with the council and pay off their accrued arrears, interest-free over a predetermined period.
Like any other large business in the country, the municipalities rely on payments from their residents and ratepayers to generate the money required to provide the services. It's a simple transaction. You give us money and we give you services.Until things start going wrong.
Until they start sending out accounts with gross miscalculations or with simple arithmetic errors caused by a goon who changed a crucial piece of software code in the billing system.Sometimes they just forget to send out their accounts at all. Slowly but surely, these fundamental errors mount up.
Willing ratepayers suddenly find that their normal rates and electricity bill of say R2,500 has escalated to R8k. Endless phone calls go unanswered. If you take the trouble to go into the council – where streams of equally disgruntled citizens stand around and complain for hours on end – you will eventually be met by a stony-faced, unfriendly and hostile person that demands immediate payment. It's like a jail sentence without a trial. Pay up or else. . .
You have no guarantee that the money charged to you is correctly calculated or that it is a true reflection of what you owe or what you (and your household) has consumed. And this inefficiency, like cancer, just keeps eats through our local government structures.
Here's a simple example: I live on a sub-divided property with three sections, namely A, B and C. I made the mistake of questioning my own electricity bill some time ago as it seemed inordinately high. I then discovered that not once in the past two years had the meter been read. In fact the meter number on my account did not exist.
So, in a flash of brilliance, the Tshwane council's representative told me that he would order a new meter, monitor that for three months and then calculate (based on the electricity and water consumption)
He would then deduct the payments made and we would end up with a final account. It sounded simple enough. A month later, I received a bill for just over R13k. The next month it had risen to R19k and then, in the third month it was sitting at about R23k. So I went to look at the meter box.
What the geniuses had done was to take out the three separate meters for the three properties, combine them all into one and bill me for all electricity and water consumed on three different properties. You can imagine the mess we must now try to unravel. This is irritating inefficiency in a council that still almost functions. My irritations pale into insignificance when they are compared with many others that I have come across.
Forget the rates bills or the incorrect electricity charges. Consider the more damning evidence that residents in Louis Trichardt, Emfuleni or Delmas have to deal with. For them the water systems are polluted and disease-ridden.
They have to live and survive on a diet of bacteria-infested water. The water is so foul that it starts killing their children, their elderly or their infirm. And the councils in many regions of Mpumalanga, KwaZulu-Natal or the Eastern Cape go unpunished. What on earth do we do to rectify this municipal mess?
A rates boycott aimed at forcing municipalities to comply with basic good governance? Johannesburg tried it some years back and ended up losing its case when, eventually, it came before the courts.Municipal lobbying of ward councillors?
Well the ballot box has, so far anyway, failed to achieve a change of government anywhere in Africa and I can't see that pattern changing in the next few generations. Government's existing track record of failing to deliver services over 15 years has not altered or changed the way people vote in a general election. Just look at this year's election results.
The only possible course of action might be to appeal to the courts. But even that seems to have little or no effect as the string of cases against the Emfuleni Council proves. The court orders are simply ignored.
So it is with a great sense of impotence that I sit and ponder the future of our councils. It seems that there is nothing we can do to protect our money. Nothing we can do to compel the local authorities to deliver services and nothing we can do to stop our councils from wasting our money.
And that, on a lovely spring morning in Africa, is deeply disheartening.
Source: Property 24
For London property, UK Country Houses, homes & estates, Farms & waterside Property Search and Relocation assistance, contact Sands Home Search.
Tel: UK Office - 01425 462 549 (0044 1425 462 549);
For Cape Town, South Africa Property Search and Relocation assistance,
Tel: Cape Town, South Africa Office - 076 222 7518 (0027 76 222 7518)
To Email us: http://www.prlog.org/
Web: www.sandshomesearch.com
email: inbox@sandshomesearch.com (cut and paste this email address into your email program, e.g. microsoft Outlook)
