The Tshwane municipality’s aggressive drive to recover outstanding overdue electricity and water payments from businesses and government departments has yielded some success as it managed to collect more than half a billion rands – within less than two weeks.

“Since last week Wednesday, we had recouped over R500m,” said metro spokesperson Selby Bokaba.

The metro is now entering the third week of its disconnection drive.

He said the metro was starting to see several defaulting businesses and government departments make payments and/or arrangements for payments.

Tshwane recently reconnected businesses such as Prasa after it paid R28m, while Gautrain Hatfield had its bill of R10m, paid by the Gauteng province, with an additional R2m paid upfront.

Bokaba recently also revealed that the metro’s debtors book stood at more than R17b.

The debt was due to R1.3b being owed by government departments and embassies, R4b owed by businesses within Tshwane and R8b by residential customers.

Tshwane has since last week focused on residential estates. They could, however, not be named due to security reasons.

The metro also warned residents and businesses to avoid illegal connections as it was a crime.

“Theft of electricity and tampering with our infrastructure is a crime.”

Peter Sutton, Tshwane MMC for Finance, encouraged utility clients in the metro to pay their accounts to avoid service interruptions.

“We have noted a concerning trend of non-payment due to disputes being lodged regarding certain services on municipal accounts.

“We would like to make it clear that a dispute on a service line, such as electricity, does not exempt customers from paying for other municipal services, such as water, sanitation and waste services,” Sutton said.

He said it is important that customers continue to honour payments on all services consumed while a dispute was being addressed.

He added customers were advised that all payment arrangements had to be made on time to avoid service interruptions, where applicable.

Sutton concluded the metro had further established an affordability committee to look at applications from customers to assist those who were unable to pay their municipal bills.