Tshwane denies court disputes as it cuts off water and electricity

The MMC for Finance in Tshwane Peter Sutton has denied allegations that the city is being challenged in court following its revenue collection campaign that saw the city disconnecting electricity to a number of government departments, businesses and state-owned enterprises last week.

Sutton said less than 1% of the court challenges brought against the city for disconnecting debtors have been successful so far.

He said that the city had anticipated a pushback and ensured that it has legal teams on standby.

“A lot of people are questioning the facts about court cases, and the perception is being created that all the cases with disconnecting are being challenged in court and we are losing it,” said Sutton.

“That unfortunately is factually incorrect. I can state to you that we have done in the last week over 420 disconnections for businesses as part of this campaign we are launching now to get our credit control actions in line again with our policy and our credit control bylaw.

“Less than two percent of those cases are being challenged in court and less than one percent of those cases have actually been successful against the city, so it is not true that all the cases are being challenged in court.”

He explained that the city has been careful about how it disconnects water and electricity from a legal standpoint.

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“We do take a lot of care in the evenings to go through those accounts, to deal with them, but I think it is very important to know that when you have a dispute on a service item on the account, it is for that account, it is for that item only and not the entire account, and what we often find is that people would declare a dispute for instance on electricity or water consumption or usage on the bill and then they will stop paying the bill entirely and the law does state very clearly that it is only the item that is in dispute (that must not be paid at that time), all other services must still be paid for.”

The city’s revenue collection campaign is in full swing, and will soon reach residential customers in suburbs, townships, complexes and estates that owe it R17 billion.

City spokesperson Selby Bokaba said there has been “an overwhelming response from our customers and we’ve been inundated with calls from customers enquiring about the process to follow to make arrangements for the payment of their accounts that are in arrears”.

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