The Tshwane Metro’s proposal to write off outstanding debt on municipal bills sends the wrong message and the Freedom Front Plus (VF Plus) is strongly opposed to it.
The debtor’s ledger, which mainly reflects municipal bill debt, currently amounts to R30 billion. To put it in context, the Metro’s budget for expenditure in the current financial year amounts to R50 billion.
So, outstanding debt equals 60% of the total annual expenditure budget.
The proposal is that R20 billion of overdue municipal accounts should be written off, which is equivalent to 40% of the Metro’s total expenditure budget.
Another proposal is that overdue account holders should receive a 70% discount when they pay their outstanding debt.
This is absolutely unacceptable in the Freedom Front Plus’s view seeing as it, in effect, rewards poor payers and punishes loyal payers.
What is just as shocking is that councillors and officials’ overdue municipal debt amounts to R18 million.
An ANC councillor who is overdue with just under R1 million now qualifies to have R500 000 in outstanding debt written off.
The Freedom Front Plus insists that the Municipal Structures Act, which determines that councillors and officials who reside within the demarcated area of the Metro may not be more than three months overdue on their municipal bills, should be stringently enforced.
The Mayoral Committee also recommended that residents guilty of criminal offences, such as illegal connections to the power grid, should be given 30 days’ amnesty to install new power meters.
Such proposals will not deter defaulters and offenders from defaulting or breaking the law again in the future. Instead, it will encourage them to continue with their unlawful conduct in the hope that they will be exempted again sometime in the future.
The Freedom Front Plus simply cannot support these proposals and views it as no more than political opportunism in the runup to the 2026 elections.
