The Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Northern Cape cannot support the suggestion made by a senior official of the Northern Cape Provincial Treasury that departments should simply “pay what they think they owe” when negotiating overdue accounts with municipalities.
The official’s suggestion that departments should pay municipal accounts based on their own assessment of monthly consumption rather than actual usage as billed by municipalities came during a recent meeting of the Standing Committee on Public Accounts at the Northern Cape Provincial Legislature. Departments tend to be bulk consumers of water and electricity, which is meant to generate revenue for municipalities. Suggesting that departments should only pay their municipal accounts as and when they feel like it is the height of fiscal irresponsibility, as it would encourage residents aggrieved with poor service delivery to do likewise. This would bring down municipal collection rates, which are already an uphill struggle in the Northern Cape where nearly one out of every two people are unemployed. Municipalities would be bankrupt with the blink of an eye and incapable of rendering services to anyone.
The economic viability of rural municipalities in the Northern Cape is endangered by the reluctance of departments to pay their municipal accounts timeously. Revenue generated from the sale of water and electricity to departments should be ringfenced for the maintenance and expansion of municipal infrastructure. Doing so will allow local businesses to thrive and create the kind of economic opportunities needed for municipalities to flourish.
I submitted numerous questions on the management of municipal debt to the Northern Cape Department of Cooperative Governance, Human Settlements & Traditional Affairs and requested briefings on the status of the Eskom debt relief programme in the province. The DA will continue to use the oversight mechanisms at our disposal to strive for the turbocharging of the Northern Cape.