uMngeni Municipality, in the Umgungundlovu District of KZN, will be taking disciplinary action against its employees who are bypassing electricity meters.

An electricity audit will also be conducted on employees’ and councillors’ properties.

According to a report submitted to the executive committee recently, disconnections were carried out on the properties of 44 staff members earlier this month.

The municipality has been losing millions of rands in revenue due to electricity theft and illegal connections.

“The municipality has revenue enhancement strategies to help recover losses but the municipality continues to lose money,” said the report.

In August, the municipality’s budget for the financial year, to date, for electricity, was R26m but they were only able to get back R19.5m. The main factor contributing to this loss is theft of electricity via illegal connections by community members.

Load-shedding is said to contribute to electricity revenue loss because both households and businesses do not use electricity during power cuts.

The electricity revenue loss is ongoing and there is a significant threat that if the trend continues, council will continue to incur an operating loss on its electricity trading services, according to the report from the municipality’s finance portfolio committee.

As part of the revenue enhancement strategy, the municipality has implemented credit control debt collection and in August, their call centre managed to collect R4.9m. The municipality has also been disconnecting illegal connections.

Chairperson of the finance portfolio committee, Pam Passmore, says the municipality’s debt was the biggest challenge with the debtor’s book sitting at R245m and there was little progress in rectifying the situation.

“The outstanding debtors and the losses had an impact on the low revenue in August.”

Passmore says they had received early warnings from National Treasury that stressed that all municipalities need to take action to ensure they would not be in financial distress going forward.

“The municipality is going to be dealing with cost containment in terms of this letter, which tells us there are serious financial problem in the country. It was recommended that cost-containment strategies and monitoring should form part of all portfolio committee meeting agendas.”