amos masondo


Power cut-offs loom for Joburg residents

Tuesday, June 14, 2011 No Comments by Zelda

Johannesburg residents face a new threat of electricity cut-offs, for nonpayment of outstanding bills.

This means a moratorium on cut-offs imposed by the city council in March — to allow ratepayers to sort out inaccurate bills issued in the recent billing crisis — has been lifted.

Revenue spokesman Stan Maphologela said yesterday the city was “stepping up its credit control in order to collect outstanding debt”.

“The campaign began on May 1, with the sending of pre-termination notices to all defaulters, mainly companies, corporates, and state departments,” Maphologela said. “The second phase will be undertaken with domestic customers.

“The pre-termination notices were sent since last week. We will continue to cover all defaulters, and the intensity of the campaign will be felt towards the end of next week and month-end,” he said.

“Customers who have applied and qualified for discounts as well as customers who have logged queries, received reference numbers and ensured that the account is flagged, will be excluded from the credit control campaign.”

He said that to date 65000 billing queries had been received, 52000 of which were resolved.

Lee Cahill of the civil rights organisation, Johannesburg Advocacy Group, said the city’s claims of its account resolution rate could not be accurate. “On January 26 the former mayor, Amos Masondo, said there were 80000 inaccurate bills.

“The city later claimed there were ‘only’ 65000 incorrect bills. If we accept all of these figures are accurate, this equates to a resolution rate of about 1000 complaints every working day from January 26 to April 14. By way of comparison, the new National Consumer Commission announced last week it had managed to resolve 60 complaints since it opened on April 1. This is an average of 1.3 disputes a day. ”

Credit to: Business Day

  • Email
Tagged , , , , ,

Pikitup and city backs out of agreement

Friday, April 15, 2011 1 Comment by Zelda

Heaps of rubbish is piling up all over Johannesburg and the stench is becoming unbearable.

The face of Johannesburg.

Yet Pikitup and the City of Johannesburg backed out of an agreement they reached with Samwu last Friday.

The South African Municipal Workers’ Union (Samwu) said earlier in the week that it had accepted the City of Johannesburg’s and Pikitup’s minimum wage offer of R6 609 to end a refuse-worker strike, but apparently Joburg mayor Amos Masondo had interfered in the process to ensure that Pikitup management did not sign the agreement.

Refuse workers based at waste-management agency Pikitup went on strike more than a week ago demanding that an investigation be commissioned into allegations of corruption worth millions related to tender fraud.

The workers were also asking to level pay disparities so that there would be a minimum wage of R6 609.

Samwu held a press conference on Wednesday afternoon to air two issues.

One, that Masondo was a spanner in the works of a wage agreement being signed between Pikitup and the union, and two, that a meeting of an investigation task team that was set up to tackle corruption and nepotism did not take place on Tuesday as planned.

“All we want is for the city management and Pikitup to sign the proposals that had been tabled on Friday; the strike will then be called off.

Workers are happy with the proposals that were made on Friday and have accepted the offer,” said Menzi Luthuli, Samwu’s Gauteng provincial organiser.

But he added: “We cannot understand why both the City of Johannesburg and Pikitup have backed out of signing the agreement that the parties have reached and why they have not commissioned the investigation task team. We are willing to call off the strike and are waiting at the negotiating table …”

Gabu Tugwana, director for communications in the mayor’s office, could not be reached for comment.

At the time of publishing, Pikitup CEO Zingisile Ntsaluba was not available for comment on whether the mayor was interfering in the process and what was happening to the investigation into corruption and nepotism.

Meanwhile, this week all the Pikitup board members, except one, resigned. Tahir Sema, Samwu’s spokesperson, said that that while the resignations were a step in the right direction, the union had no intention of forging ahead with wanting an investigation — it has handed documents showing alleged corruption to the Special Investigation Unit and to the Hawks.

Credit to: Mail and Guardian

Read related news on The Mobilitate Witness:

Pikitup on full-blown strike

  • Email
Tagged , , ,

Joburg bills to be settled- mayor

Wednesday, March 9, 2011 No Comments by Zelda

The City of Johannesburg on Wednesday said it will now give residents with long-standing billing queries substantial discounts.

Johannesburg Mayor Amos Masondo

The City will also take disciplinary action against workers who allowed bills to go out despite the fact they were blatantly wrong.

Johannesburg Mayor Amos Masondo made the announcement during his State of the City Address on Wednesday.

“We have listened and we have heard the customers,” he said.

Masondo said in a bid to resolve the issue, a resolution was taken at a mayoral committee meeting on March 3 that as from March 2011 billing queries between 90 days and 12 months would receive a 25 percent discount.

Queries that were 12 months and older would be given a 50 percent discount.

Masondo said this arrangement was, however, subject to criteria which included that a billing query must be logged and resolved before a write-off could occur “as there is no intention to create any credit balances”.

The criteria further includes conditions that the consumer must pay in full or make an arrangement to pay all amounts outstanding over 90 days by 30 June 2011, in order to qualify for the write-off.

The consumer must have provided an identity number, verifiable physical address, postal address, email address and cellphone or land line number.

“Once again, I would like to take this opportunity to apologise for the inconvenience caused to the Johannesburg residents and citizens by our new billing system.

“We commit to work diligently and to do everything possible to correct the situation and resolve every single outstanding query,” Masondo said.

City manager Mavela Dlamini said they could not believe some of the bills that residents received.

“We were astounded by the fact that some bills were sent out when they looked blatantly inaccurate,” said Dlamini.

Masondo said the announcement is about finding a long term solution.

“It is not meant to paper the cracks. We are looking at comprehensively addressing the problem so that when we are done with it, it truly becomes a problem of the past,” he said.

The move appears to be an admission of the seriousness of the problem.

The resolution comes after some residents approached the media after they received inflated monthly bills and others had their services cut off despite having their accounts up to date.

In its initial bid to resolve the billing matter by addressing a media conference, Masondo angered the affected residents and some opposition parties when he said the billing problem did not amount to a “crisis”.

Credit to: Times Live and Eyewitness News

Read related stories on Mobilitate News:
Billing crisis ‘blown out of proportion’
Billing: ‘50% resolved’

  • Email
Tagged , , ,

Billing crisis ‘blown out of proportion’

Sunday, March 6, 2011 5 Comments by Zelda

The billing crisis in Gauteng had been “blown out of proportion”, according to the head of the portfolio committee on local government and housing.

Errol Magerman, the chairperson of the provincial local government committee, had visited the City of Johannesburg’s council and said that they had been “frank and honest about some problems”, the Star newspaper reported on Saturday.

“It was the implementation of the new system that obviously brought about these problems,” he said.

Magerman said that his committee would monitor the situation to avoid a repetition and that a report on the billing and revenue problems facing the affected municipalities would be submitted.

The Gauteng portfolio committee for local government and housing visited the Emfuleni municipality and the City of Johannesburg to gather information on their billing systems and revenue collection.

This follows a billing crisis in the province in which residents have been, among other things, sent bills for inflated amounts and had their services cut off without notice.

City of Johannesburg Mayor Amos Masondo also attributed the problems to the implementation of an IT project known as Project Phakama, which was designed to improve the city’s billing system.

On Friday, the Democratic Alliance said the Gauteng government had failed in its service delivery to yet another municipality in the province.

“The [Nokeng tsa Taemane] municipality is unable to send out municipal bills and residents are forced to collect their latest accounts from the municipality,” DA roads and transport spokesperson Fred Nel said in a statement.

“If this is not enough, customers are charged with an amount of R35 when collecting accounts… customers who fail to collect their accounts are having their electricity cut off,” he said.

Nel called on Gauteng Local Government and Housing MEC Humphrey Mmemezi to intervene by visiting the municipality and informing residents how the problem would be solved.

Credit to: News 24 and Sapa

  • Email
Tagged , , ,

Billing: ’50% resolved’

Wednesday, March 2, 2011 2 Comments by Zelda

The City of Johannesburg has resolved half of the billing queries received from residents in the inner city, it said on Tuesday.

“Executive mayor Amos Masondo and his customer revenue team [CRM] [were thanked] for helping to resolve half of the 500 outstanding queries residents had with their city accounts,” city spokesperson Gaynor Mashamaite-Noyce said in a statement.

“At a meeting held with the Johannesburg Inner City Business Coalition [JCIBC] in early December it was agreed that all outstanding queries received up to December 10 would be prioritised and tackled,” she said.

CRM spokesperson Stanley Maphologela said it dealt with all queries sent from the JCIBC for distribution and resolution.

‘This process worked well’

Fifteen main issues were identified and categorised under revenue, rates and planning matters.

One issue concerned the incorrect cut-off of power and water.

“A process was set in place to expedite reconnections where engagement on queries had started. This process worked well and the number of emergency interventions has been reduced to nearly zero,” Maphologela said.

Another issue that had not been addressed sufficiently was the conversion of commercial rates to residential rates where buildings had been converted.

“Other key billing issues were the exorbitant bills some people had received and some bills that made little sense,” Mashamaite-Noyce said.

Maphologela said: “We have already made a lot of headway in addressing those top issues and we expect this process to be finished by the end of March.”

Credit to: Mail & Guardian and Sapa

  • Email
Tagged ,

Joburg billing report ready

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 1 Comment by Zelda

Gauteng’s co-operative governance MEC, Humphrey Mmemezi, has finished investigating Johannesburg’s billing crisis and is ready to report to his boss, Sicelo Shiceka, the minister, and to the Public Protector.

Shiceka gave Mmemezi until February 18 to report on the extent of the city’s billing chaos and present a plan for fixing it.

This followed a public outcry when the city cut water and electricity supplies to more than 40000 households, claiming they were in arrears with their bills. But the bills of many householders have been vastly inflated.

The billing problems have been blamed by the city on its Project Phakama, an IT system intended to integrate municipal services accounts into one database “for effective accounts management”.

Mmemezi conceded that the city was struggling even with the basics, such as running its Joburg Connect call centre.

“I’m ensuring that senior staff, including IT managers, the municipal manager [Mavela Dlamini] and [finance boss] Parks Tau do not delegate the billing problem to junior staff,” he said.

But, like Johannesburg mayor Amos Masondo, Mmemezi insisted that there was no crisis.
“There is a light at the end of the tunnel. There were visible weaknesses in the system, but a number [of them] have been addressed.”

Credit to: News 24

  • Email
Tagged , , , , ,

Joburg: R300m not collected

Friday, January 28, 2011 1 Comment by Zelda

The City of Johannesburg failed to collect about R300m in service charges in the first quarter of the 2010-2011 financial year, and officials have blamed Project Phakama for the bungle.

This comes barely a day after Amos Masondo, mayor of the biggest and richest municipality in the country, denied that the city was in the throes of a revenue collection and billing crisis.

Council documents reveal that for the period July to September last year, the city’s revenue and collections department failed to collect about R300-million in service charges owed to City Power, Pikitup and Joburg Water.

Now the city’s infrastructure and services oversight committee has asked the revenue and customer relations management department to provide it with a report on the “status-revenue collection, billing and related matters contributing to the decline in collections” in the three entities.

The report must also provide a “turnaround strategy devised to specifically correct the situation with regard to revenue collection and customer services”.

The committee has also recommended that the infrastructure and services department “must devise high-level interventions aimed at ensuring that billing information is provided to Pikitup, Joburg Water and City Power”.

Of Joburg Water, the documents, circulated in a council meeting held at the council chambers yesterday, said revenue for the quarter was R84-million below budget.

“It was reported that revenue collection had an adverse variance of 8.7%. This was attributed to the roll-out of Project Phakama.”

Of Pikitup, it was reported that “like other entities, Pikitup also collected less than expected revenue because of billing challenges linked to Project Phakama.

“It is reported that the overall operating revenue collected amounted to R262-million against the target of R288-million, resulting in a negative variance of R26-million.”

The same was reported of City Power. “Above all, the entity reported low collection levels with revenue on service charges being below budget by R189-million because of billing challenges.”

At the council meeting Democratic Alliance councillors took a swipe at Masondo, asking him to stop pretending there was no crisis. At a media conference on Wednesday, Masondo denied there was crisis.

Furious residents last week staged a sit-in at the municipal offices in Braamfontein, protesting against the chaos.

Also read what one of Mobilitate’s users has to say about the chaos at the land transfers department.

Credit to: Sipho Masono from Times Live

Read related stories on Mobilitate News:

Billing glitches not a sign of crisis: mayor

SARS might take over Joburg billing

  • Email
Tagged , , , , , ,