Pretoria - The Lotus Gardens, Atteridgeville and Saulsville Civic Association has cried foul that some residents were served fake letters of demand for defaulting on payments by people masquerading as City of Tshwane officials wanting to extort money from them.
The civic organisation’s representatives raised the claims with Finance MMC, Peter Sutton, at a closed-door meeting at Tshwane House on Friday.
Organisation chairperson, Tshepo Mahlangu, yesterday said many residents had complained that they were presented with final letters of demand bearing the signature of former municipal chief financial officer Umar Banda.
He said it was suspicious that those letters were presented with Banda’s name despite the fact that he was no longer a municipal official, “which is why we believe they are fake”.
“Banda was axed by the City. He went to the high court, and he lost the case,” he said.
The City terminated Banda’s contract in December after he was found to have misrepresented the municipality’s financial statements, causing it “a significant embarrassment”.
Mahlangu said the alleged extortion scam mainly targeted pensioners benefiting from the City’s indigent programme.
“People have been receiving these final letters of demand, which are very much fake. We were wondering how can the City continue to dispatch and distribute fake letters of demand because that is extortion by the City,” he said.
He expressed disappointment that some officials from the finance department were absent from the meeting to address the issues.
“The meeting went very well between us and the MMC but regrettably, the people from finance who were supposed to provide clarity and answers didn’t pitch. There is a divisional head in finance who is responsible for dispatching these final letters of demand who was not part of the meeting,” Mahlangu said.
Other issues of concern highlighted by Mahlangu were unfair tariff increases, estimated municipal services bills and alleged corruption in the metro.
Sutton said: “What they claim is that there are people who are fabricating the notices of final demands for payments and are extorting money from residents. It is just another crime syndicate, and it is not as a result of the involvement of the City of Tshwane. We haven’t, of course, found any evidence of that. We did commit that we will investigate that.”
He said the organisation’s complaints about the indigent programme fell within the ambit of the City’s social development department.
“I have advised them that they need to speak to social development directly,” he said.
He said he would soon attend a planned meeting by the civic organisation to clarify some issues regarding free basic services for beneficiaries of the indigent programme.
He explained that as a beneficiary, “you get a certain amount of free basic services”. “The policy says that once you have used what you got for free you need to pay for the service that you consumed,” Sutton said.
Those who consumed more than their allocated free basic services often complained that their “billing is wrong”, he said.
“These are the issues that I will be addressing in their mass meeting and I can tell you now that it is not going to go very well because these are the issues that people don’t want to hear,” he said.
Pretoria News