Cape Town - The national executive committee of the SA Local Government Association (Salga) has concluded its two-day lekgotla in Cape Town.
The committee deliberated on its performance since coming into office 11 months ago and announced that it would be joining the action against the incoming electricity tariff hike.
The new political leadership for the organisation also heard from a number of Cabinet ministers, including Small Business Development Minister Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams, who said the three branches of government could best work together to tackle shared challenges.
Salga president Bheke Stofile said: “Today we are looking to the future. The municipal revenue base and municipal tax base have over time eroded because of a number of decisions taken by the central government.
“One such decision was to amalgamate municipalities and combine poor municipalities with other poor municipalities.
“This has been an incorrect and miscalculated decision, which is why we see 163 municipalities being defunct.”
According to the most recent data by Salga, businesses, government entities and households owed municipalities a total of R290 billion for services they had received.
Stofile said that municipalities were working to improve their municipal debt recovery mechanisms and called on the entire government to join forces in the ongoing effort to build a financially viable local government system that would increase the quantity and quality service delivery.
The devastating decision taken by Nersa to increase electricity tariffs by 18.65% in April was a key topic in the conclusion of the lekgotla and Stofile said they would take an appropriate decision on a course of action on this.
“We will not take this increase lying down because it affects our bottom lines as a municipal system in South Africa. Load shedding does affect us dearly and therefore requires new thinking in terms of electricity generation.
“We hope our governments, both at provincial and national level, will now spend time to protect the revenue base of local municipalities, otherwise there is going to be a crisis,” Stofile said.
Thamsanqa Ngubane, Salga chairperson of the electricity and energy provision and public works working group, said they met as the working group and reflected on their mandate from municipalities as numerous municipalities came to Salga to reject Nersa’s tariff increase.
Ngubane said the last and only avenue they could pursue to achieve what was mandated by municipalities over the electricity tariff increase was to take the matter to court.