Pretoria - The City of Tshwane has embarked on a virtual outreach programme to encourage customers to pay their municipal accounts in the face of threats to mobilise residents to start boycotting rates and services bills.
The Lotus Gardens, Atteridgeville and Saulsville Civic Association has for some time been crying foul about the poor state of service delivery.
Organisation chairperson Tshepo Mahlangu recently bemoaned the fact that residents were finding it difficult to pay for services that were not rendered, saying it was “daylight robbery”.
Failure by the city to render services was compounded by the three-month unprotected strike by some workers affiliated to the SA Municipal Workers Union demanding salary increments.
The unprotected strike has resulted in disruption of service delivery such as refuse collection and withdrawal of Tshwane Bus Services.
In a recent TV interview, municipal manager Johann Mettler expressed concern that a campaign to boycott paying rates “hurt the city more”.
“It will set us further back and it will certainly not be to the advantage of the ratepayers,”he said.
Mettler said the municipality’s running required finance and infrastructure needed to be maintained.
Despite looming threats of non-payment of services, the city announced its resumption of a programme to assist residents to keep their municipal accounts in good standing.
Finance MMC Peter Sutton said: “The City of Tshwane has decided to bring back its virtual outreach programme aimed at encouraging customers to pay their municipal accounts.”
He said the programme was also aimed at assisting customers with various queries related to their accounts.
The engagements between the municipal group financial services and residents started on Monday on the Zoom platform and are expected to last until December 15.
Sutton said: “The shift to virtual communication is necessary to cater to customers who require direct engagement with revenue officials from anywhere.”
By doing online interactions customers can be assisted on account and billing queries and corrections of estimations, credit control and assistance with repayment arrangements and property rates queries. Other services from the city’s side would relate to indigent-related queries and registration, water meter queries, electricity and prepaid metering queries.
The programme will run from Mondays to Fridays, from 4pm until 7pm, and Saturdays from 8am until 1pm.
Customers are urged to have their account numbers at hand when logging in on the Zoom platform.
Sutton said: “Since hosts will be grouped in terms of the service rendered, customers will be requested to log on to the category of their query.”
Pretoria News