POLOKWANE – The Polokwane Municipality has since January terminated the services of close to 300 customers daily for non-payment.
Despite efforts by the municipality to contain its debt book, the financial report tabled in council last Monday reflects that consumers and rate payers owed the local authority more than R1.6b towards the end of January.
Households make up the biggest chunk at R1.186m (71%), commercial users R368.6m (22%) and organs of state R112.2m (7%), while debts of households (R749.7m), commercials (R203.1m) and organs of state (R53.1m) were outstanding for longer than one year.
At the end of 2016 the warning lights came on when the debt book reached R781.1m, followed by R800m towards the end of the 2016/17 financial year.
The trend continued and the R1b mark was reached by June 30, 2018, with debts older than one year totalling R634.8m.
According to the municipality’s communications and marketing manager, Matshidiso Mothapo, the municipality levies around R200m per month and the current collection rate on total payments for service against billing is around 86%.
Mothapo says the city sends out roughly 80 000 utility bills to customers per month.
“Once the accounts are not paid by the due date, which is the 25th of each month, the city will send a 14-day notice warning customers that their services will be terminated if payment is not received without reasons being advanced to the municipality. If there is no reaction from the customer, the city will proceed to terminate services,” he explained.
According to Mothapo the city has been terminating the services of around 300 customers daily since January this year on Mondays to Thursdays.
“In addition to service terminations, the prepaid systems gets blocked in line with the credit control policy until they have paid at least 20% and entered into a payment arrangement,” Mothapo added.
Mothapo stated that around R98m of the current debt relates to inactive accounts closed in the old system, of which R114m relates to deceased customers where the accounts are being followed up for possible registration as indigent.
“Credit control is enforced daily but the response is limited due to socio-economic challenges. A debt profiling and thorough analysis of the debt is undertaken to assess the recoverability of debt and the municipality is in the process of considering and implementing more robust measures of collecting what is due and to bring the debt book down,” Mothapo assured.
