LUCAS LEDWABA
A GROUP of residents fed up with the alleged break down of service delivery in the Lekwa local municipality will meet on Wednesday to finalise plans to take court action against the entity.
The Lekwa Ratepayers Association has even started a Facebook fund raising campaign to cover legal costs they estimate could be around R500 000.
Spokesperson Wilma Venter told Inside Metros that service delivery in the town of Standerton and surrounds “has totally collapsed.”
Venter blamed this on what she said was mismanagement by the municipality which falls under the Gert Sibande District Municipality in Mpumalanga.
The municipality’s area covers at least 32 200 households in the area whose economy centres largely around commercial agriculture.
“We are definitely going ahead with legal action,” said Venter when asked if they had already submitted court papers.
She said a final decision on when such action will be taken will be decided upon at a meeting on Wednesday.
Lekwa has been cited as one of top 10 municipalities that owe power utility supplier Eskom more than R13 billion in unpaid bills.
The local municipality owes Eskom in excess of R1 billion but the entity’s management are disputing this figure.
In 2018, the municipality was among those summoned by the parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Accounts (Scopa) to explain why it was not paying for its services.
The municipalities told Scopa that they were hampered by challenges including spiralling debt, compounded revenue losses, a chain of non-payment and ghost vending.
According to minutes of the June 2018, the municipalities “cited structural challenges in their own financial practices as well as historical financial constraints. They also blamed their own communities for refusing to pay power rates, and in some cases, said Eskom had unrealistic expectations of their ability to pay their debts.”
“Most municipalities that owe Eskom billions for bulk electricity supply painted a bleak picture of their finances. They cited high unemployment, resistance from consumers to pay and illegal electricity connections for their inability to pay the entity. Some municipalities indicated that they will never be able to settle their debts to Eskom unless the interest costs were waived.”
The municipality’s mayor Lindokuhle Dhlamini told Scopa that one of the biggest challenges in repaying the debt to Eskom was that payment culture remained extremely low among residents.
He said “the municipality was dealing with a situation where it is given 15 days to pay Eskom whereas it gives its consumers 30 days to pay, which allows the interest to accumulate aggressively. The municipality is experiencing challenges in enforcing credit control due to the fact that Eskom is the distributor to the defaulting areas.”
Dlamini could not be reached for comment by Inside Metros on Monday, but he told public broadcaster SABC that the municipality had to implement rotational load shedding because of Eskom capping electricity supply as a result of a R1.1 billion electricity debt to the power utility.
He was quoted saying that due to challenges surrounding the error account, there have been challenges in agreeing with Eskom and that to avoid a total blackout they have embarked on internal load shedding to try to share the lead within different areas.
He said in the past two weeks with the increase of cold weather, it has necessitated to also load shed during the day because the previous one was between 17:00 and 21:00 in the evening.
But Venter said other services such as sewage control, water supply and road maintenance had also collapsed. This, she said had negatively impacted on the farming economy that sustains the dorp.
Lekwa has been accused of failing to control sewage contaminating the Vaal river that meanders through the town. The river deposits its water into the Vaal dam which supplies most of Gauteng with water.
“There’s nothing that’s working in Lekwa,” said Venter.
(Compiled by Inside Metros staff)