The City of Tshwane is in a process of reconnecting Prasa headquarters after cutting its services when the rail service agency failed to make payment towards its R11m bill. 

This was not the first time Prasa went off the rails for not settling its account with the city. Four months ago, the agency was disconnected because it owed the City of Tshwane R28m.

The city had told SowetanLIVE's sister publication TimesLIVE at the time that the amount was a consolidation of all the properties Prasa owned the city.

City spokesperson Selby Bokaba told TimesLIVE in the afternoon that they were on their way to reconnect the state-owned entity after they paid more than R8m, hours after they were cut off

Bokaba said when services were first switched off, 60% of the debt had to be paid for it to be reconnected. 

He said the city was still switching off defaulters.

“We will no longer give a blow-by-blow account of how much we have collected. We’ll do so after we have reached a certain threshold,” he said.

In June, the city resumed its revenue-collection campaign dubbed #TshwaneYaTima in a bid to recoup R17bn owed by government departments, businesses, residents and embassies. It said the campaign would also target prepaid electricity meters that had been tampered with.

According to a breakdown by the city, residential customers owed the most, with arrears of R9.2bn.

The Mpumalanga Economic Growth Agency (Mega) owed the most under “entities”, with arrears of R140m.

The city confirmed that it has paid Eskom an amount of R876,296,947.97. This after Eskom rejected its offer to enter into payment settlement arrangements for the R878m owed to the power utility.

TimesLIVE