In a bid to relieve the debt-ridden stakeholders of their financial burden brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Tshwane has introduced an incentive and relief program aimed at enabling its customers/residents to bring their municipal accounts up to date.
The program offers a decrease in account payments and writes off interest charges for customers who are in arrears. It is implemented through different packages on offer to customers.
These packages are only for customers who are in dire need of such an intervention due to their inability to pay their accounts or for those who are in arrears, and for those who might desire to settle their account in advance. The City said this aspect is very important as arrears attract interest on customers’ accounts, causing debt to pile up and the accounts becoming difficult to manage.
Residential customers and businesses have various options to choose from.
Relief options include customers that are up to date but cannot continue to make full payments, customers in arrears with debt not older than 12 months, and also customers in arrears with debt older than 12 months.
The Incentive includes customers whose accounts are up to date. If their account remains up to date, customers will get rebates on their property rates. This also applies to customers who pay their accounts in advance.
“We urge all our customers to make use of this opportunity to bring their accounts up to date through this program that started running from 1 June 2020 and will end on 31 December 2020,” said Tshwane Lead Administrator, Mr Mpho Nawa.
He said the City of Tshwane has endured a low revenue recovery due to the significant number of some of its ratepayers that lost their jobs, took salary cuts or had to shut down their businesses due to the Coronavirus that has wrought economic havoc to most countries globally and affected adversely on the City’s finances.
In order to minimize the financial burden on residents, organizations, and businesses, the City has introduced an incentive and relief program to enable everyone to keep up with their municipal accounts and bring them up to date.
Mr Nawa said while the City understands the financial burden of its customers, it needed to collect revenue to be able to continue providing the much-needed services to the community.
“Local government is tasked with providing basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity, roads, refuse collection and many other services, and these require a generation of revenue through the payment of municipal accounts.
“Having observed the difficulty faced by our residents and being a caring administration, we decided to come up with a bouquet of incentives and a relief program to lessen the financial burden on our valued customers to enable them to keep their accounts up to date,” Mr Nawa said.
A payment application form is accessible on the website and at customer care centers. A payment illustration document is also available for customers to compare the different options.
More information can be found at the City’s Customer Care Walk-In-Centres across its seven regions, the website www.tshwane.gov.za or the social media pages, twitter:@citytshwane and Facebook.
