Johannesburg’s new finance MMC, Matshidiso Mfikoe, says she will fix the stubborn billing crisis plaguing SA’s biggest-budget municipality by implementing a multimillion-rand online portal. Also high on her list of priorities is to achieve clean audits, reduce the infrastructure backlog and adhere to a strict consequence management regime in the metro.
The previous administrations under erstwhile executive mayors Parks Tau, Herman Mashaba and the late Geoff Makhubo struggled to end the billing crisis in the municipality that resulted in late bills, incorrect billing, lost credit notes, non-corresponding meter numbers and other inaccuracies.
The country’s richest municipality, which contributes nearly 20% to GDP and about 40% to the economy of Gauteng, has been plagued by numerous challenges in recent months that caused the city to seek help from the private sector to repair potholes.
Apart from its ageing infrastructure including the electricity grid and roads network, the municipality was also recently hit by a water outage that affected hospitals and threatened businesses.
In an interview with Business Day last week, Mfikoe, the newly appointed member of the mayoral committee (MMC), responsible for finance and ICT, said service delivery challenges will be a thing of the past for Joburg residents.
Regarding the billing challenges in the metro, Mfikoe said the municipality will be launching — in two to three weeks — a bill management portal that will enable customers to view their municipal accounts, log in to their meter readings, and lodge queries, among other things.
Customers’ queries
“The city appointed its municipal-owned entity MTC for the implementation [of the portal] which is expected to cost R25m for the first phase,” said Mfikoe.
She conceded that because the metro printed about 1-million bills per month, “we are aligned to some margin of error”. Some of the identified challenges are that the city does not respond timeously to customers’ queries, something she hopes the portal will address.
“We are hoping and praying that the portal should be a silver bullet to the billing challenges in the metro.”
She was reluctant to admit there is a billing crisis, saying that billing queries have dwindled to 4,000 from 10,000.
She also wants to reign in fruitless and wasteful expenditure, and ensure that the city’s assets, including the roads network and buildings, are repaired and maintained.
“We do have backlogs in the city. The infrastructure backlog is in excess of R100bn. We want [officials] to use what has been allocated [to their departments] and do the right thing,” she said.
Soon after his election as executive mayor earlier this month, Jolidee Matongo warned the city’s 30,000 employees that if they did not spend budgets allocated to their departments for service delivery they would be fired.
In March 2020 the metro announced that it had returned R617m of service delivery grants back to the Treasury “over the last three financial years, due to a failure to spend”.
Disciplinary committee
Mfikoe was confident that her team is equal to the task of turning the city’s finances around. The metro has a budget of R73.3bn for the 2021/2022 financial year.
“The supply chain unit has committed to improving its systems [to curb] irregular expenditure,” she said, revealing that a disciplinary committee has since been approved by the council to “purely deal with consequence management in how the city functions”.
Regarding those struggling to service their municipal accounts due to the negative economic climate spawned by Covid-19, the finance MMC said the city’s debt rehabilitation programme, aimed at assisting defaulting customers and businesses to bring their outstanding municipal accounts up to date, has received about 13,000 applications to date.
“We serve communities. People must feel that local government works for them. Those who are able to pay for services must pay [because] their payments will help us cover those who are not able to pay.”
Mfikoe said communities “deserve to be served with integrity and honesty and accountability remains important for us”.
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