OPINION: Money going down the drain

DEAR Editor,-

The debtors book of Ugu District Council stands at R290-million. This means that some consumers who buy water do not pay. Nobody knows how many water meters are connected to the system. Neither does anybody know how often the meters are read. No one can say how many estimates are made every month and consumers billed accordingly.

At a portfolio committee meeting on sound governance in April, the acting chairman (there has been no chairman for eight months) asked that the committee be provided with details of how many meters are actually read every month at the next meeting. When the May meeting took place, there were still no figures available.

Two items on the agenda of the Finance Committee held last week screamed for comment. One was overtime pay and the other travelling expenses. The table reflecting the top 20 overtime payments showed that one official who earned R25 000 a month was paid R76 000 in overtime over a period of six months. This works out at R12 600 a month in extra income from overtime!

Turning to the April figures, an official was paid R30 000 in overtime for working 140 overtime hours in a single month. His basic salary is R20 000 a month, so in April his total income from Ugu was R50 000.

To place this in some sort of perspective, and rounding off a month to 28 days for ease of comparison, he worked his normal 160 hours of straight time, which is eight hours a day for a five-day week. His overtime amounts to an additional 140 hours for the month. His workday is thus eight hours normal time, plus five hours overtime totalling 13 hours a day for a whole month. This is inordinately stressful, inhumane, dangerous and illegal.

As far as travelling claims are concerned, there was a claim for R13 626 in April for 2 605 km and another of R9 757 for 3 078 km. These top end claims suggest daily travel of 113 to 137 km per day. What sort of job demands this?

When these two items were tabled for discussion, the acting chairman (who seemed concerned) asked for comments, but there was a stony silence before the parrot cry of ‘noted’.

It took a lengthy report with details of how an amount of R29-million must be written off because of deceased customers, to provoke some comment from the finance committee.

D SNASHALL