Pretoria - The City of Tshwane yesterday cracked the whip on affluent homeowners and tenants in Centurion’s Copperleaf Gold Estate for tampering with meters.
Domestic helpers, gardeners and security guards were stunned to see a convoy of electricians, plumbers and metro police officers descending on the estate they thought was home only to the rich who could afford the soft life.
Some residents said they were surprised to see the municipal contingent arriving at the estate as part of the #TshwaneYaTima aggressive revenue collection drive.
City of Tshwane spokesperson Lindela Mashigo was part of the team that sought to inspect the meters of at least 600 homes in the city, where the electricity consumption was suspiciously low and at times inconsistent with water usage, to the extent that it raised red flags.
Mashigo said that prompted the City to conduct a scanning of the area. It found that despite there being a significantly low number of solar panels, the consumption was suspiciously low.
He said the estate was not responsible for the debt because the homeowners and tenants were directly paying the City of Tshwane for water and electricity. This meant they could not claim that they had been paying the body corporate.
“Of the residents who owe the City a lot of money, 10 are non-payers who have not made a single payment in a long time. This problem stretches as far back as 2019 and well into (pre) Covid-19 times.
“We have a situation where some of these clients would receive an electricity bill that could just be two days worth of electricity, meanwhile the water meter is running every day.
“This is not one of those cases where the homeowners or tenants pay their bills to a body corporate, so we are dealing with the clients directly. We disconnected those found guilty of tampering with our meters and accordingly issued them with fines.
“Another team will be coming to do further investigations for those accounts that are still very suspicious. Our artisans suspect that some clients may have manipulated their meters.
“We must be able to say that the usage here has dropped because this person is away most of the time or has turned the home into an Airbnb, or they installed solar panels before we could rule out tampering,” said Mashigo.
He said the City was carrying out this operation as it had with homeowners in the townships recently.
The aim was to end the culture of non-payment and introduce a habit of consumers paying for services they have used. This would aid the City’s revenue collection, and by extension support the provision of service delivery.
He said these residents still had time to benefit from the amnesty programme for theft of water and electricity, put in place to assist account holders to be brought back into the grid if they make an application before the end of the month.
The MMC for Finance, Peter Sutton, said the amnesty programme was implemented because the City encountered electricity theft daily, and it was costing an estimated R470 million each year.
He said this was an amount taken away from service delivery by individuals and business owners in the city through pure arrogance and entitlement.
The amnesty programme sought to weed out those individuals who executed illegal connections and tampering by offering a period where those individuals and business owners guilty of electrify theft could apply for amnesty to be exempted from prosecution and fines under certain conditions.
The City increased its fines for illegal connections and electricity theft to R200 000 for individual or household accounts and R10m for business accounts. In addition to these fines, it will lay criminal charges and pursue the recovery of lost income.
Sutton said: “We have established a highly skilled multidisciplinary revenue collection team for this purpose, to which we have allocated R68m in this financial year.
“Stealing revenue from the City that must go to basic service delivery and support the poorest of the poor in Pretoria is a crime, and if you are an individual or business owner involved in electricity theft and tampering with prepaid meters, you should b e very concerned.”
Pretoria News