The Govan Mbeki Municipality must enter into a service agreement with Eskom to prevent the power entity from completely shutting down the electricity supply to the area.
This comes after the municipality’s appeal in court to have Eskom lower the interest charges on the outstanding debt failed.
GMM owes Eskom more than R3 billion in debt and has to repay an additional R500m annually in interest charges.
The executive mayor, Nhlakanipho Zuma, told the GMM council at its recent council meeting that the court has ruled against the municipality in arbitration between the municipality and Eskom.
Zuma also said in the process of the ruling, they have noticed errors that were committed by the presiding officer of the court because the judgement is giving more than what Eskom wanted and now places the municipality in a worse situation than before the arbitration.
“Our administration has appealed this judgement.
“We are supposed to enter into a service level agreement with Eskom and we want to know what support are they giving us in order for the municipality to be able to pay them.
“If we do not enter into the said service level agreement with the power utility, we might face the situation that we faced with Rand Water where the water was closed off to the community.
“The municipality suffered a serious economic loss at the time and it even impacted the lives of our community,” said Zuma.
He said the council needs to meet its obligations.
“We have pleaded with Eskom that we are entities of one government and we have to find ways to build up and not to destroy each other.”
Zuma said they have put forward a partnership agreement for the power utility to give support to the municipality in the areas in which the GMM is limited.
