Joburg residents face a city consuming its own future
· Citizen
Sometimes, columns write themselves. Last week I got a pre-termination notice for my water and lights bill.
It had been paid. After three decades of marriage and 20 years in Joburg, I’m fairly scrupulous about this.
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But according to the letter, I was in dire risk of being cut off, sued or both.
The letter of demand came on the 27th with instructions to call the office, or the call centre, if there was a dispute.
Here’s the rub, the number on the letterhead, +27(0)-86-056-2874, was out of order. As for the call centre’s number, (011)-375-5555, there was the dreaded doom loop: “we are currently experiencing a high volume of calls”, for the accounts option.
Even after 20 minutes? It’s strange that, because for a municipality that loses almost half its water through leaks in the pipelines, it’s actually far more responsive on the technical side.
A week before the polls, though, there are letters of demand and no way of querying them, or even confirming receipt of payment.
It’s difficult to be positive about our world-class African city when the officials don’t seem to share the urgency to pick up a phone and take a call about an account they’ve already declared a bad debt before 30 days have even elapsed.
But, then again, this is a municipality that has let its bad debts spiral from R15 billion to R72 billion in the past 10 years.
It’s a municipality that, as Ann Bernstein of the Centre for Development and Enterprise says, has created a fiscal fiction.
It’s a doom loop, she says: people aren’t paying so the city hikes the tariffs on those that are, while salaries now account for 40% of the money that is actually collected, while spending on outsourced contractors is surging at more than 10% a year, outstripping inflation.
Her most telling remark is that this is not a city building for the future, “it’s a city consuming the future to fund the present”.
Tomorrow’s polls are perhaps the most important in Johannesburg’s history, more profound, even, than the watershed of 1994.
And yet not every resident will turn out to vote.
As people have been saying on social media: “If there’s 10 people on the bus and three vote to drive off the cliff, two vote against it, and five people don’t vote, you’re all going off the cliff.”
It’s that simple. Choose wisely.