Our city of Durban and municipality of eThekwini will not survive another 5 years of an ANC controlled council. Every year rates and electricity go up around 25% for the people that are least likely to afford it, and salaries only go up about 7% if you are lucky.

There are only 8.37% of the residents of our municipality paying to run this municipality,(3.5 million residents, 350,000 rate payers 56,000 of those excluded through the social program that leave 8.37%) now, anyone looking at that would say that it is unsustainable, anyone that is, except the current people making those decisions. And those people are the ones earning in excess of R1 million, and in the case of our city manager R1.7 million. So the increases they force through don’t affect them like they do the rest of us.

Krish Kumar recently blamed the economic slowdown for the R440 million that ratepayers are in debt to the city for non payment.  The economic slowdown has become a convenient scapegoat, and that excuse should work both ways. How about, because of the “economic slowdown”, we freeze the budget and cut municipal spending instead of raising rates. I would also be in favour of having an efficiency expert go through every municipal department and make recommendations, as I am sure that the municipality is top heavy with dead wood, and we as a municipality are not an employment agency, we are here only to deliver services to the public.

It is not right that we write off R98 million in hostel debt, because as they explained “we don’t know who is there and who is not supposed to be there and how long they have been there” that is a poor excuse for someone who did not do their job. And the R14 million we recently wrote off for the back rent owed by the tenants of the church walk market. We have these officials and politicians writing off these large amounts of money like it was nothing. In the news recently we, the ratepayers, now have to pay in excess of R600,000 in court costs because a municipal employee did not do their job correctly during a tender application. What happens to that employee or others that because of their negligence?  they cost the rate payers millions of Rand. There is absolutely no accountability.

Maybe we should really start collecting the millions of Rand owed by government agencies, let’s turn off their lights and water like they did in Cape Town, and like Cape Town we would have that money in a matter of days. Krish Kumar is being disingenuous when he says” the city still maintained a high debt collection rate of 95%”, the reporter should have asked him how he comes about that number because I know they have their own twisted formulas for arriving at these high percentage rates in their favour, because they claim that almost 20% contribute to the running of the city, but you can see from my numbers that they are bending the truth there too.

At this rate we are going to keep losing ratepayers, thereby causing rates to be increased to makeup the short fall which will cause more ratepayers to leave etc, etc, etc. We have to cut spending and have more respect for the ratepayers hard earned money, the city needs to realise that rates and utilities are not a residents only expenses, we do not work to support their out of control spending.