MunicipalNews

Acting municipal manager on a mission to collect historical municipal debt

The acting MCLM municipal manager is leading a campaign to engage with top owing businesses to collect millions of rands in historical debt.

Mogale City’s acting municipal manager is leading a campaign by the Mogale City Local Municipality (MCLM) to collect millions of rands of debt that businesses owe the municipality.

The Acting Municipal Manager, Dorothy Diale said in a statement that prior to Covid-19, historic debt was a major and growing concern. It not only affected the municipality’s balance sheet and the public’s perception of the municipality’s stability as an administration, but above it affected all the levels at which basic utility services such as water and electricity could be provided efficiently.

The pandemic further adversely affected economies across the globe, with major industry collapses, job losses and reduced working hours affecting incomes, cutting and reprioritising budgets becoming the order of the day.”

Government and municipalities that are at the core of service delivery were also not immune to these effects and experienced an increase in non-payment. This impacted the historic debt, general revenue losses and other operational challenges like billing and municipal resources.

“To ease pressure on the already strained national fiscus and by implementing the municipality’s Financial Turnaround Strategy, MCLM is embarking on a strategic and forward-moving debt-collection drive among businesses that owe the municipality millions of rands.”

Acting Municipal Manager, Dorothy Diale. Photo submitted.

The campaign started on February 1, and Diale and a team of municipal officials will meet with the top 2 businesses owing the municipality.

The objective of this progressive approach is to professionally engage these business debtors that add value to the local Mogale City economy, understand their challenges and discuss a workable approach to ensure that debt is paid, and quality services are provided in turn by the municipality.”

This phased approach is starting with businesses that are the major consumers of MCLM services, and the aim is to see a long-term plan of collecting debt across various municipal service user groups.

“Whilst the municipality is setting out to collect revenue to overcome challenges of expenditure exceeding income and a growing overdraft, Mogale will also embark on some extensive groundwork that will see an improvement in delivering quality, timeous consumer and customer services as we strive to build a revived Mogale City administration and economy.”

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