For the past three weeks I have spoken to many Tshwane residents about their municipal bills following the implementation of a new municipal budget. This is part of the DA’s listening tour in Tshwane in preparation for the local government election. Our focus has been on investment and jobs, to better understand what Tshwane can do and stop doing to make it easier for businesses to invest. Fixed-capital investment is essential to economic growth and job creation, and anyone who wants to be a mayor of metro in Gauteng has to start by asking: what can we do to make it easier for businesses to expand and employ more people? But the more we tried to speak about jobs, the more residents spoke about skyrocketing municipal bills. We heard this over and over again from businesses and residents who unlike ANC deputy mayor and Finance MMC Bonzo Modise do not receive protection from credit control. Last week I was in Rosslyn, one of the two industrial hubs in Pretoria. One factory owner showed me a bill that has doubled from one month to the next after the new budget was passed. Although the business owner has no government contract, he employees about 200 people. He does business with tens of contractors who together employ even more people. Asked about investment pledges that have reportedly been made to ANC coalition mayor Nasiphi Moya, another business owner told us that electricity is Tshwane is too expensive for his business to carry out any expansions. Businesses aren’t the only ones to complain. Yesterday I was in Elandspoort, a suburb of Pretoria West that is not wealthy by South African standards. Many of the residents are young black professionals and their families moving up in life. Elandspoort has been hit especially hard by Tshwane’s new property valuation roll that came into effect with a new electricity tariff as from 1 July. I spoke to one Elandspoort resident who used to pay R300 a month in property rates and is now charged R1,400 a month. In the eyes of the municipality his house is now worth about R1,8 million, considerably more than the bank’s valuation. Whether or not that is an objective assessment of the market value, the point is that overnight the same person in the same economic circumstances is paying a lot more to the municipality. That’s not even to mention the electricity bill, which is also significantly higher. For a family like the one I visited in Elandspoort, Tshwane, alongside Johannesburg, is now the most expensive metro in the country. A house valued at R1,8 million that uses 600 kilowatt hours of electricity, 20 kilolitres of water, and receives weekly waste collection the municipal bill is higher than in Ekhuruleni, Durban and Cape Town. Yet the services are not by any stretch of the imagination on a Cape Town standard. When they prepared the budget that was adopted at the end of June, Mayor Moya and the ANC coalition knew that the 2025/26 financial year would be particularly difficult for Tshwane consumers. With a new valuation roll and a new electricity tariff structure, they also knew to take measures to cushion the blow to consumers. Until Tshwane achieves a financial turnaround, there will not be a significant improvement in service delivery. And so, while steps are being taken to improve the city’s financial performance we have to be careful not to overstretch consumers by pushing up bills to a level not justified by the standard of services. The DA made two substantive proposals on how Tshwane could push back against higher bills. This was in advance of the draft budget released for public participation. We said that the council should increase the non-taxable portion of a home’s value, from R150,000 to R450,000. We also warned the council not to approve the introduction of any new municipal tariffs or taxes. Consumers are under immense pressure. The economy is not growing. Tshwane is not yet in position to show residents value for money. But instead of pushing back against higher bills, Mayor Nasiphi Moya and her ANC coalition have pushed in the other direction. The policy of the ANC and their coalition partners have been to make life and work in Tshwane significantly more expensive. They wanted to say that they had achieved a funded budget, even though Tshwane had failed to clear a R857 million deficit at the end of 2024/25. And so in their first budget since coming back into power at the courtesy of ActionSA, the ANC imposed a so-called city cleansing levy in order to balance the books at residents’ expense. As a matter of law, the tariff has to be reflective of the cost of delivering that service. We could not get this assurance in 2024, when officials proposed to the DA and our coalition partners to implement such a levy and thus we rejected it. And we certainly did not get this assurance in 2025 when the ANC coalition proposed the cleansing levy. In the same budget which imposed the cleaning levy, the ANC and their coalition partners actually reduced spending on city cleansing. They want to charge you more, but spend less, and then use the money to plug a deficit which they have not managed to clear with good financial management. When the cleansing levy was challenged in court, Tshwane could not explain whether it was a tax, a surcharge, or a tariff. It also could not counter the argument that the charge constituted a form of double taxation. Reading the judgment, it is clear that the city could not even produce basic documents in support of the legality of a separate cleansing levy in addition to a waste collection charge. The court was scathing about the city’s handling of the case, even citing the professional conduct of the legal team. The court ordered the levy to be reversed and existing payments to be credited to customer accounts. Even before the city’s spokesperson could confirm that the city was studying the judgment, the EFF MMC for environmental management blurted out on social media that the city would appeal. Leave to appeal was refused, which means that the city now has to petition the Supreme Court of Appeal. As we speak no such appeal has yet been lodged. By the end of this month, not only had Tshwane again billed residents the city cleansing levy. The city restored previous charges of the levy which had been reversed by court order. This despite the fact that there is currently no appeal to the judgment of the Gauteng High Court, and therefore no legal excuse to escape the order of the court. Even if Tshwane decides to petition the SCA sometime before the deadline to do so, at the time this months bills were invoiced to residents there was no appeal in place. It is almost as if Tshwane is now acting as a law onto itself, having decided that it will appeal the case, and acting as if such an appeal has already been lodged. While residents have been facing skyrocketing bills, and a municipality who is happy to litigate against them over a municipal charge they can’t even explain, Tshwane has also suspended credit control on a property owned by the North West provincial government and leased by ANC regional chairperson, deputy mayor and finance MMC Bonzo Modise. We are today releasing a copy of a municipal bill on the property of the former Morula Sun, where a company that belongs to Modise operates as Mzansi Resorts. We have drawn attention to this matter before, and our colleagues in the North West have also revealed just how little Modise and company pays the North West government to lease that premises. When we broke this news, Mayor Moya did nothing. She was sitting on her own municipal debt, which has since been disclosed. The breaking news now, is that the R23 million bill on Mzansi Resorts is still not paid, and that credit control has still not been done on the property despite Mayor Moya leading Tshwane credit control teams to cut the power to schools, businesses and recently the Tshwane University of Technology. It is time for the mayor to stop fronting for the ANC and to end the double standards which apply to billing and credit control in Tshwane. Our public challenge to Mayor Moya and her ANC coalition is twofold. First, make the commitment not to appeal the cleansing levy judgment. Bring a new funding plan to the municipal council with a set of measure of how we can close Tshwane’s budget deficit. We are happy to contribute DA proposals to such a plan in the interest of the city. Second, lead a Tshwane ya Tima disconnection team to Msanzi resort and apply the credit control policies that apply to the rest of us here in Tshwane. Moreover, if Deputy Mayor Modise cannot get his company to pay what he owes the municipality, he must be fired as Finance MMC. |
