Pretoria - The City of Tshwane’s hard work to stabilise its finances by increasing revenue collection was paying off, said executive mayor Randall Williams yesterday.
Williams said over the past few months they had gradually increased revenue collection, ensuring that the administration continued to take the City on a path of recovery from a R4 billion deficit.
The amount, he said, was incurred by administrators when the City was put under administration by the Gauteng provincial government.
According to him, proper recovery would be when the City finally reached a point where it had surplus to pay its debts to creditors such as Eskom and cover its operational costs and have significantly higher budgets for service delivery in all departments.
Although the wheel was turning rather slowly to the point where it was known that the City was a slow payer to Eskom, Williams emphasised that Tshwane was not to be mistaken for a non-payer because it settled its bill to the power utility even though it did so some days late.
He said revenue collection was increasing, and, for example, they collected R3.039bn in June. This increased to R3.179bn in July and R3.357bn in August. “Now in September, we collected R3.532bn which is one of the highest collection rates we have seen in the City.
“Our commitment to protect our City is clear and we will make sure that we stabilise the finances and take this metro into the future together,” Williams said.
However, he said more costs were created on the City side by load shedding as it damaged infrastructure because of the constant outages.
“Unfortunately, it seems that load shedding is going to be with us for a long time and, worryingly, the continuous blackouts have a damaging impact on our infrastructure and electricity network.
“This means that residents may experience prolonged power outages after the load shedding period has ended. The reality is that our electricity network was never designed to be continuously switched on and off.
“Unsurprisingly, Eskom refuses to take responsibility for infrastructure damages caused by load shedding. Now, on our part, the City is examining all options to decrease our dependency on Eskom.”
He said the City of Tshwane was still clear that it rejected the excessive tariff price hike proposed by Eskom for the 2023/24 financial year.
“The proposed tariff increase of 32% will have a detrimental effect on Tshwane residents, businesses and the already precarious financial health of the City.
“I think we are all aware that the state of the City’s finances has come under a great deal of scrutiny, especially with our Eskom bill payment challenges.
“The reality is that since we inherited the R4.3bn deficit left by the illegal ANC administrators, it has been a slow process to gradually turn around and stabilise the City’s finances. This is why we initiated our aggressive revenue-collection campaign where we disconnect defaulting clients.”
Pretoria News