Boksburg community threatens to boycott rates

Gatvol Boksburg community wants to boycott municipal rates and taxes.

Well over 1 000 of the city’s residents gathered in the parking lot at suburban shopping centre El Ridge Corner yesterday to protest against ongoing blackouts, desperately seeking solutions for Ekurhuleni’s crumbling infrastructure.

A rates and taxes boycott was favoured by the angry crowd.

A vague feedback

Many residents and businesses have been without electricity for up to 10 days with vague feedback from the municipality, indicating another few days’ wait before the lights go back on.

“We just want the basic services that we are paying for,” a resident told The Citizen. “I have been a resident since childhood and this place is just going down the toilet,” said another.

“Why is our power off but across the road there are people stealing electricity and nothing gets done about that?”

Another furious resident added: “They get services for f**k all.” Local ward councillor and Democratic Alliance (DA) spokesperson on energy and water Simon Lapping said the community was angry, “rightly so, too, because service delivery is lacklustre, it is poor, and nobody in the municipality knows what the hell is going on”.

Lapping had to carry the weight of community anger, of a heckling crowd that booed him and other public representatives.

They did not want to hear rhetoric, they wanted solutions from their elected representatives. Often, councillors’ hands are tied.

ALSO READ: WATCH: NSPCA moves Impala Park tigers to wildlife facility

Time for action

But, said ActionSA’s leader in the Ekurhuleni council, Michael Basch, the time for action is now.

“Areas in Alberton have just come out of a seven-day outage and while the meeting in Boksburg was happening, Pomona, other areas of Alberton, Wadeville and about seven other areas in Ekurhuleni were in the dark, too.”

Last week, Kempton Park suburbs endured days of darkness, firstly due to a melted cable and then, Lapping alleged, due to substandard replacement cables being installed.

“It’s as if they don’t even read the manual on how to perform basic maintenance, let alone patchup-and-go repairs,” he said.

Basch said: “We need to put our foot down and hold those in power accountable. “We have no time for underperformance – we have had mayors removed before. We will do it again.”

ALSO READ:‘Flouting by-laws’: Anger erupts over informal settlement near Boksburg suburb

Political issue

Ekurhuleni has an executive mayoral system, in other words, the mayoral chain also binds their political office to the executive, and the city manager reports into the mayor.

ActionSA leader Herman Mashaba, who attended the meeting to listen to residents, said although community members wanted to avoid politics, the problem was political.

“It is all intertwined.” Mashaba said it was the duty of elected representatives to take officials in the municipality to task when they failed residents.

 “It is political, there is no other way to describe it, and it must be solved politically before it can cascade into the system and clean it out.”

The Boksburg community adopted an action plan in response to the ongoing crisis. It entailed utilising local WhatsApp groups to deliver community-initiated solutions to ward and public representative councillors, after which it would be tabled in council.

But they did not want to continue paying rates and taxes to a municipality that, they said, was rapidly destroying the city.

Lapping said although it was illegal to withhold rates and taxes, there was a line item on municipal bills called “services” which, he said, residents could legitimately refuse to pay.

“Because there is no service delivery and, legally, you do not have to settle up for a service that you are not receiving,” he said.

ALSO READ: DA Knysna councillor in hot water for ‘monkey circus’ remark

A mess

“You would not have to pay a barber if all you did was sit in his salon and admire his clippers. The same counts for this.”

A resident said: “I hope this becomes a regular occurrence – meetings like this – at communities across the country.”

“We are all sick and tired of this, of what the government is doing to our country, from the townships to the leafy suburbs, cities, and industry.

“It’s just a mess. We have had enough. Do you read me? Print this: we have had enough.”

Coalition partners ActionSA and the DA faced the angry residents side by side and, although it was not smooth sailing, at least the parties managed to share the stage.

DA chief whip Mike Waters did not attend because he said ActionSA had hijacked a community gathering.

However, several DA councillors were in attendance, along with the party’s local political head and member of the provincial legislature Bronwynn Engelbrecht.

ActionSA was also out in full force. Basch said: “We are seeing the city manager and the head of department for energy today, and they had better start thinking of some answers to the rot.”

There was no sign of any city official at the meeting.

NOW READ: ‘ANC recognises leaders not pure, their souls need to be enriched’ – Mbalula