Joburg's new plan for billing crisis

Johannesburg has announced ambitious targets and deadlines for resolving the municipal-services billing crisis that has given residents nightmares.

Trevor Fowler, the recently appointed city manager, said the city will implement what it calls a "revenue step-change roadmap", a plan that, he claims, will help resolve the city's billing woes within 19 months.

South Africa's richest municipality has, for the past two years, failed to deal with a billing crisis that prompted former local government minister Sicelo Shiceka to intervene.

In April, residents approached the National Consumer Commission to force the municipality to resolve disputes that have dragged on for years.

Briefing journalists on the plan, Fowler and the revenue department's chief operating officer, former Johannesburg Water managing director Gerald Dumas, repeatedly refused to answer questions about the number of billing queries still unresolved.

Presenting the "roadmap", Dumas announced that:

• By February, the city will have enhanced its systems to improve billing accuracy through continuous data interrogation and it will have resolved queries related to property clearance certificates and change of ownership;
• By June, IT infrastructure will have been upgraded to help front-line staff deal with customer queries;
• In December next year, performance agreements between the municipality and municipal-owned entities will be signed, and the Joburg call centre's woes will be resolved; and
• All residents will have a new customer relations system, including access to e-services through an improved website.

Yesterday, the Joburg Advocacy Group, which represents residents' associations, said residents had "very little confidence" that the accuracy of billing could be improved. The group maintained that the city's targets and deadlines were "just another wish list".

The group's founder, Lee Cahill, said: "The city has shown that it simply can't be trusted to get it right or to manage a crisis of this magnitude effectively."

Earlier this year, a group of residents from Blairgowrie, in northern Johannesburg, laid criminal charges against the then mayor, Amos Masondo, and his successor, Parks Tau - who had been a member of the mayoral committee for finance - for violations of the Municipal Systems Act, accusing them of cutting off their electricity based on disputed bills.