The Lotus Gardens, Atteridgeville and Saulsville Civic Association has threatened to embark on “an indefinite rent boycott” campaign as part of intensifying pressure on the City of Tshwane to attend to their service delivery concerns.
Organisation chairperson Tshepo Mahlangu accused the City of failing to respond to their memorandum of complaints about services submitted to Finance MMC Peter Sutton two weeks ago.
Mahlangu vowed this week to mobilise residents to boycott any municipal activities such as outreach programmes involving consulting firms hired by the City to collect revenues from households.
“We are going to embark on an indefinite rent boycott until our demands are met,” he said.
Inaccurate billing, fraudulent letters of demands sent to defaulting customers and hiring of consulting firms were cited among some of their grievances raised to the municipality.
On Wednesday, Mahlangu said he was giving the municipality at least 48 hours to respond to demands highlighted in the memorandum on behalf of the aggrieved residents.
He threatened that the municipality “will face fierce resistance from all seven regions, especially the neglected black townships” should it not adhere to the 48-hour ultimatum.
One of the strategies to be employed by the group would be to prevent politicians from conducting door-to-door election campaigns in townships.
“The DA-led coalition and their cartels who aided them to refuse employees salary increases that led to on-going wage strike, won’t be welcomed in our townships until our demands are met,” Mahlangu said.
On November 10 some residents led by the association took to the street in solidarity with municipal employees demanding salary increases from the municipality.
The protest took place outside Tshwane House despite the municipality declaring the long drawn-out strike officially over.
Mahlangu said: “They must stop using the consulting firms' services. The money that is due to employees is redirected to the consulting firms. We are not going to allow that because if the workers are not satisfied the residents are not going to get services and yet we are expected to pay for those services as residents.”
Upon receipt of the memorandum, Sutton promised to deliver it to the office of the mayor and respond within seven days in writing.
Yesterday, he said he will find out whether responses were forwarded to the association according to his promise.
Municipal manager Johann Mettler previously expressed concern that a campaign to boycott paying rates would hurt the city financially.
He said the municipality’s running required finance and infrastructure needed to be maintained.
Pretoria News