If you’ve recently purchased prepaid electricity, only to find that you have received much less than you paid for, this might be attributed to your property’s rates and taxes being in arrears. The Mbombela Local Municipality (MLM) has been implementing this method of collecting arrear payments since March. The systems to do this are, however, regularly faulty.
Mr Pieter Louw recently complained about this situation. On October 1, he tried to buy electricity. Municipality officials said that his rates and taxes account had not been paid up to date.
Louw drove home, obtained a copy of his proof of payment. After proving that his payments were up to date, he was able to purchase electricity successfully.
On October 26, he paid R300, but received only R150 worth of prepaid electricity. Once again, he was accused of not paying his account. A day later, he tried again. This time, he was told that the person who had to deal with his query was out of the office. He asked for assistance from senior officials, but to no avail.
Eventually, an assistant explained why the system indicated that Louw’s rates and taxes had not been paid.
“The official explained that MLM’s IT-programme had been giving problems for three days.” This was confirmed by two other locals who had reported experiencing the same problem. “The system is not working,” was the answer offered to explain the chaos each time.
Nelspruit Post raised the issue with MLM. The municipality admitted having experienced problems with its IT system. According to Ms Bessie Pienaar, MLM spokesman, it sometimes takes a while to pick up payments made to the municipality via third parties. If a client pays the municipality through a middleman such as the bank or post office and the system has not yet updated to reflect this, 50 per cent of the client’s payment towards prepaid electricity will be deducted.
Although the problem lies with the municipality, in many cases, they have little sympathy for clients. Pienaar said that client’s whose rates and taxes payments appear incorrectly on MLM’s system, must proceed to fix it from the clients’ side.
“It remains the responsibility of the customer to give proof of payment and the status of rates and taxes payments then gets updated accordingly,”she said. “This is in accordance with bylaws that took effect when the new financial year started.”
