City of Tshwane offers an incentive and relief package
23 JUNE 2020
In a bid to relieve our debt-ridden stakeholders of their financial burden brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, the City of Tshwane has introduced an incentive and relief programme aimed at enabling its customers to bring their municipal accounts up to date.
Tshwane has endured a low revenue recovery due to the significant number of some of its ratepayers that lost their jobs, took salary cuts or had to shut down their businesses due to the Corona virus that has wrought economic havoc to most countries globally and impacted adversely on the City’s finances.
In order to minimise the financial burden on residents, organisations and businesses, we have introduced an incentive and relief programme to enable everyone to keep up with their municipal accounts and bring them up to date.
Tshwane Lead Administrator Mpho Nawa said that while the City understands the financial burden of its customers, it needed to collect revenue to be able to continue providing the much needed services to the community.
“Local government is tasked with providing basic services such as water, sanitation, electricity, roads, refuse collection and many other services, and these require generation of revenue through the payment of municipal accounts.
“Having observed the difficulty faced by our residents and being a caring administration, we decided to come up with a bouquet of incentives and a relief programme to lessen the financial burden on our valued customers to enable them to keep their accounts up to date”, Nawa said.
The programme offers a decrease in account payments and writes off interest charges for customers who are in arrears. It is implemented through different packages on offer to customers.
These packages are only for customers who are in dire need of such an intervention due to their inability to pay their accounts or for those who are in arrears, and for those who might desire to settle their account in advance. This aspect is very important as arrears attract interest on customers’ accounts, causing debt to pile up and the accounts becoming difficult to manage.
Residential customers and businesses have various options to choose from:
Relief options
- Customers that are up to date, but cannot continue to make full payments
- Customers in arrears (debt not older than 12 months)
- Customers in arrears (debt older than 12 months)
Incentive
- Customers whose accounts are up to date are not left out. If their account remains up to date, customers will get rebates on their property rates. This also applies to customers who pay their accounts in advance.
We urge all our customers to make use of this opportunity to bring their accounts up to date. The programme started running from 1 June and will end on 31 December 2020.
A payment application form is accessible on the website and at customer care centres. A payment illustration document is also available for customers to compare the different options.
For more information, please visit the City’s Customer Care Walk-In-Centres across its seven regions, the website www.tshwane.gov.za or the social media pages:
Twitter:@citytshwane
Issued by Communication, Marketing and Events Department.