Money saved from curtailing losses and curbing waste will increase the amount available for General Expenditure on Service Delivery by R 7.7 billion to a total of about R 10 billion from the current R 2 billion. This would be a five-fold increase without raising any new rates and tariffs.
The City is simply overstaffed with management personnel and understaffed with artisan skills. It makes no sense to have managers without staff to manage in their departments. When democracy came to South Africa in the 1990s the City had a staff complement of just over 5000 and all services were rendered in-house by the city. Today we employ over 25000 people but virtually all our services are out-sourced.
The department that allowed this position to develop will be cleaned up and in fact, needs to be cleaned up given that it will be the department tasked with reducing the City’s staff complement to a sane number.
The positions of all Departmental Heads will be reviewed at the start of the term. A new government should not want to rule with the directors of a previous government.
By doing away with inefficiencies like the regional model of the city – that does nothing to improve service delivery by increases management staff numbers seven-fold, and implementing other strategies to reduce management to a sane level, enough costs will be saved on their salaries to employ a full complement or artisan staff that can actually do the work and still achieve the aim to reduce staffing costs to about 20% of the operational budget in five years.
Regionalization of the city will be changed fundamentally to avoid the wanton sevenfold duplication of senior management positions.
Ghost employees will be tracked down, removed from the salary roll and prosecuted for fraud.
Staff that do not perform will be disciplined and if their performance does not improve they will be terminated.
Today the TMPD has 38 officers per region serving on each 8-hour shift per region (16 wards), they have just 4 vehicles per region to respond to incidents and to do their work. 13 vehicles of the TMPD is presently out of commission.
No effective policing can be done in this environment.
Year after year the city appoints a controversial police chief with exemptions from required qualifications. We will ensure that the Head of the police will be a duly qualified professional policeman, the best the city can find, the department will be properly staffed with enough officers to do the work that needs to be done in every ward, with enough vehicles to perform their functions efficiently.
With a functional and disciplined TMPD department in place we will be in a position to:
1. Control cable theft
Copper cable theft is a scourge of our society. It costs the city hundreds of millions per year in direct replacement costs, not counting the economic costs of interrupted power supply.
For two years the last administration had a specialized cable theft unit that managed to curtail cable theft to some extent, although it never functioned optimally. Then without explanation, the unit was disbanded, with an increase in cable theft incidents. This unit, even though it was not spectacularly successful still saved the city more than their costs.
It is the function of the TMPD to protect the city’s assets – see our platform position on the TMPD for how we will improve the department and consequently reduce and control cable theft losses.
2. Reduce electricity theft
Reducing electricity theft by just 50% will save the city (and every ratepayer) 20% of the operational budget. This is money that should be spent on normal service delivery.
(See our platform on fixing the TMPD and introducing green initiatives to bring every resident into the payment loop).
Corrupt procurement lies at the centre of all corruption and tenderpreneurship. We will require every procurement staffers to be professionally qualified by and to be a member in good standing of the Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS). This will be a condition of employment.
The last five years have seen an unprecedented number of substation fires and explosions – more are on their way as the maintenance of substations have been allowed to lag. Partly due to incapable contractor appointed to do the work every municipality usually does in-house and partly because of financial mismanagement; the city does not have the money available to properly maintain the electricity grid.
When Wapadrand burned down (twice), it was rebuilt with parts scavenged from other substations, in the process a new (substandard) Wapadrand temporary substation was built and another two were operationally degraded. This is no way to maintain a city’s electricity grid.
Our public representatives are committed to making the funds needed to maintain the electricity grid to an acceptable professional standard and to provide electricity supply within the terms of the City’s electricity distribution license.
A properly maintained electricity grid will save money on unnecessary substation repairs.
About 20% of bulk purchased water is lost through unaccounted for use and leaking infrastructure. Because the city’s infrastructure has fallen so far behind in maintenance and modern configuration in the last 27 years, it is nearly impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy how much is lost for which reason.
We are committed to modernize our water reticulation network, to cut the number and duration of burst pipes and smaller leakages by ensuring that the city’s plumbing stock is up to date, the department is properly staffed with enough artisans to do the work timely.
By running a proper department we aim to reduce water losses over five years by 25% to bring it in line with best standards.
(See our platform on staffing reform for more information.)
In 2015/16 financial year the city for the first time failed to collect a full R 1 billion of its budgeted revenue. For 20 years the debtors book had grown relentlessly to reach R 7 billion at the time when the current administration took office.
The new administration made a number of changes to the staffing of the revenue department and lost no time to increase property valuations in the east in a targeted move by an average increase of more than 76% in 2017 and again in 2020. The property rates for over 48% of residential properties elsewhere in the city were not similarly increased.
The result was a financial disaster. Within 3 years thereafter the debtors book was doubled and the annual deficit of budgeted revenue over actual revenue is now more than R 2.5 billion annually.
Ratepayers simply cannot afford the predatory rates imposed on them any longer and the default book will continue to grow as long as unaffordable rates are imposed on one subset of the city’s ratepayers only.
To ensure that all rates are fair and affordable, we will have an affordability study done over the whole of the city and ensure that rates and tariffs do not exceed the ability of ratepayers to pay it.
The prevailing culture in the city, where some pay rates and others don’t contribute anything, not even the costs of administering their presence on the books of the city is not a healthy social culture. Every citizen should be a ratepayer and be part of the payments loop. It is very difficult to introduce a non-payor into the loop when his fortunes improve and create a society rife with corruption.
Every citizen should be a stakeholder of the city, no matter how much or how little he can contribute.
(See: Transferring RDP housing & fixing the valuations roll & pushing green technology).
The city has no disputes tribunal. We will pass the bylaws needed to create an efficient and fair independent billing disputes tribunal to resolve issues by independent and efficient justice.
TThe city will take no credit control action on any bill that is based on estimations.
All residents will receive their bills by post or internet as they prefer.
The compilation of the Valuation Roll and the periodic revaluation process is one of the few municipal processes that has always escaped formal council oversight by a committee of public representatives. City valuers have never been confronted by oversight and called upon to explain the contents of the valuation roll. This must end. We will seek the creation of a standing committee with the right to hold hearings to review the work of officials on the valuation roll.
The Tshwane Valuation Roll process has for many years been managed by officials without any council oversight, they report to no-one, explain nothing and make decisions with huge financial implications for residents who has limited recourse against their decisions – making them arbitrary and capricious. As of today, more than 15,000 properties have a nominal value of R 1.00 attributed to them although the law does not allow nominal values to be attributed to fixed property.
More than 48% of all residential properties in the city are valued below the threshold for paying rates, most of these properties are RDP houses that remain categorised as municipal properties at a nominal value of R25,000 – a value that does not change when other residential properties are periodically valued for updating the roll, yet we know that RDP houses that are in the market and have been transferred to their intended recipients sell for in excess of R300,000, well above the threshold for rating purposes.
After municipal properties, State-Owned Enterprises are the biggest landowners in the city. By law, they fall in a category that pays preferential rates, a fraction of that paid by ordinary residential ratepayers – yet their properties are systematically valued at a fraction of the values of adjoining land, giving them a double subsidy at the expense of ordinary ratepayers.
The most egregious example of abuse is the arbitrary and capricious recategorization of agricultural properties on the urban edge as residential – thereby imposing an immediate 400% rate increase on owners in economic circumstances who can not afford such extravagances.
We will ensure that every property is fairly valued at a true market value.
We will change back the unfair recategorization of agricultural properties to residential; and
We will ensure that the process of valuation will be open and transparent and for once we will create a permanent standing committee to oversee the work of the city valuator and to investigate on a continuous basis complaints of abuse in the process and the valuator’s office.
An astounding 48% of residential categorized properties do not pay rates. The bulk of these is RDP houses that have forever been retained on the city’s asset register and have never been transferred to the intended recipients. Because these properties are mostly categorized as “municipal property” and appear at a nominal value of R25000 on the valuation roll, no rates are paid in respect of these properties – despite the fact that these properties are “bought” and “sold” informally (the sales “registered” with the municipality) for an average value of R 350,000, more than double the first rates rebate on residentially categorized property.
Due to the financial mess, the city has been over the years, because it has borrowed beyond its means to repay, previous governments have all found it impossible to transfer these properties to their rightful owners as it served as the asset base of the city against which the excessive loans have been justified.
This cycle must end and these properties must be transferred and their new owners must be given the value to enrich their lives and to earn value for themselves as property owners.
Not only will the new owners be given the dignity of a title to their own homes, but they will also all be introduced into the ratepayer’s payment loop as stakeholders of the city and relieve the pressure on an ever-shrinking existing ratepayers base.
If procurement is the source of corruption in the city, outsourcing is the big recipient of the largesse of corruption.
Quite simply, we will end all outsourcing of basic municipal functions. We will employ our own staff to do our own work, as municipalities the world over does and we will do it with half the staff the city currently employs.
Many of the outsourcing contracts now in place are illegal in terms of the Municipal Finance Management Act and Supply Chain Management Regulations. We will lose no time to cancel early what can be – and not to renew any contract that has run its course.
By reducing the number of management positions at a bloated salary bill and by in-sourcing all the artisan staff we need, who is now employed by entrepreneurs at great cost we will save more money but employ more workers spreading the dignity of employment and wealth wider.
There was a time when Waste Management in Tshwane was world-class, using best in class equipment. Then the previous government out-sourced it to contractors. The result was two-fold: the cost of waste management sky-rocketed and the levels of service plummeted and the equipment in use has become archaic by world standards.
A single waste collection truck can fill four loads a day using half the staff per truck. They are designed to offload their full containers and take new empty containers on the fly. Full containers are collected by specialised trucks that take four full containers in one journey to the waste dump and can complete two trips in an ordinary 8-hour workday.
As waste management operates now, one truck does one load and takes it for offloading once per day. We pay the contractor rental per truck per day and for the staff per day. This is yet another procurement scam.
Optimizing waste management will save the city R 700 million annually. In just one year we will save enough money to buy and equip the three new waste dumping sites the city needs as an absolute minimum.
Previous government’s solutions were to throw more money at the problem and raising this money from residents by doubling the tariffs for waste removal. The current government did this by introducing a so-called City Cleaning Levy that doubled your tariffs. It was ostensibly to cover the cost of cleaning the inner-city (which is as filthy as it ever was to this day), only the next year under civic pressure to collapse this levy into the waste removal tariff, effectively increasing waste removal costs to residents by 226% after their first two budgets.
Raw effluent and wastewater are polluting our rivers and poisoning our water resources for all who depend on it are not acceptable for any environment.
To this day Baviaanspoort remains incomplete, when completed it can function at a sufficient capacity to treat all wastewater currently produced in the area it was designed for. The city has over the last five years spent more than twice the capital cost of completing the waterworks on chemicals to treat the water and the rivers because it has not been completed.
Rooiwal remains incomplete after five years, leaving Hammanskraal with the foulest water in the city and destroying the rivers from which farmers in the area used to pump water for agriculture, laying waste to the agricultural potential in the area. This is again a capital project that must be completed.
The cost to the economy of the city and the health of its people is incalculable.
Development of the city’s master plan has all but stopped due to a lack of funding. Services in the East where most of new residential developments occur is stymied because the bulk sewer lines are not built as it should by now have been done. As a result developers use inadequate solutions like pump stations to pump effluent to existing sewer lines, instead of it being fed by gravity feed to its destinations.
Apart from the fact that this adds to the cost of development, these pump stations need electricity to work and when power is off, or a pump station malfunctions, the effluent lands up in our rivers where it does enormous damage to the city’s ecosystem.
There is no substitute for proper city planning and proper development. We commit ourselves to that.
Part of a satisfying living experience is the comfort to know that your community is protected by certain rules that protect property use, the social environment, the quality of life and property values. Whilst these rules and regulations exist, they need to be enforced, something that is done selectively if at all.
There seems to have developed a practice in the city to tolerate unplanned and unapproved land uses and to rather impose penalty rates for illegal land use than to actually insist on legalizing land use conduct. This might provide the city with sorely needed extra revenue, but it does not serve to protect the interests of ratepayers.
The departments concerned are fully staffed but lack a budget to actually launch court proceedings to enforce their regulations in court when the need arises.
We will address the selective implementation of these regulations and ensure that enough funding is made available to ensure the city develops in a planned, controlled manner and that all existing property rights are protected against town planning and land use abuses of property by others.
We regard the loss of any business or the failure to attract any new business to the area of the City of Tshwane as a tragedy, yet the city has predatory ratings and property valuation practise that alienate business and keep new business out.
When the current administration took over in 2016 for instance the industrial area of Despath had a manufacturing occupancy rate of over 90%. Today roughly 60% of the manufacturing space is empty, after two particularly aggressive property valuation cycles attributed grossly unrealistic values to properties in the area and following predatory rates and tariffs imposed on business.
There is no such thing as a “business tax” – all taxes paid by business is eventually absorbed by the individual end-user. We do not believe in driving business away by taxing it out of business and eventually out of the city.
Just as it is important for a country to attract investment and keep money inside its borders to the benefit of its people, so it is important for a city to attract money and investments and to keep it within the boundaries of the city.
Unlike a country, we cannot impose exchange controls and must resort to creating environments that attract and retain investment in the geographic area of the city.
Some of the greatest drains on our resources are money spent on bulk purchases of electricity, money spent on water and the cost of fuel and money spent on outside contractors and manufacturers of goods.
Every penny retained and spent by the city’s residents on other residents as salaries, to purchase goods, pay for services enriches the city and its people.
To ensure that money stays inside the city’s boundaries for as long as possible we will develop attractive business opportunities by levying reasonable rates and tariffs on businesses, prefer procurement from local manufacturers and suppliers, especially when the goods they offer are locally manufactured, ensure that employers employ South Africans and lawful immigrants with fixed addresses in the city in preference to undocumented foreigners and we will implement green energy incentives to reduce the reliance on energy purchased from outside the city.
(See: Making the city the hub of greening technology manufacturing.)