Johannesburg – The City of Tshwane is fining businesses R10 million each for illegal connections as part of their revenue collection campaign, aimed at disconnecting services to defaulting clients and doing away with illegal connections.
Tshwane mayor Randall Williams, Finance MMC Peter Sutton and officials took part in the drive, disconnecting services to defaulting clients.
“We conducted the campaign in the inner city and in Pretoria West, where we largely targeted businesses that have repeatedly failed to pay the City for services rendered,” Williams said.
The City revealed that various businesses, together with one government department, owed the City about R50m for defaulting on their water bills.
Three properties in the area, a private school, a hair salon, hardware and scrapyards for cars were discovered to be illegally connected.
In another building, the electricity connection was found to be coming from the City’s substation, and was feeding two more properties next to it.
“Our teams immediately disconnected the illegal connections. We have since issued the businesses with illegal electricity connection fines of R10m each,” said Williams.
Williams has also encouraged customers to pay for services or to come forward and make payment arrangements with the City to keep their accounts in good standing.
“I want to encourage our teams who are driving this campaign to push ahead, as this will ultimately benefit Tshwane residents. Increased revenue collection is critically important to any municipality to effectively run its operations and to enable quality service delivery,” said Williams.
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