Tshwane mayor on a mission to restore city’s poor finances

Tshwane mayor Cilliers Brink is on a mission to attract investors, gain revenue to repair the city's adverse audit finding and catch up on its Eskom debt.  

Brink said this at a presentation at the Atterbury Theatre in Pretoria on Tuesday when he presented his vision and priorities for the city. Priorities include:

• getting control of the city’s finances;
• putting measures in place to reduce unplanned power and water outages;
• ensuring basic services are improved; and
• securing service infrastructure from vandalism and cable theft.

Speaking to the media, he said he was not fundraising but rather building confidence among the business community to make contributions to subsidising the city’s services.

“Tshwane desperately needs wealthy people because those people subsidise services to the less wealthy. I don’t want them to go to Cape Town. I want them to stay here and invest here. That is why we have to speak to all. I think these partnerships are important to build a city that works for its people,” he said.

Brink's goal was to mend the auditor-general’s adverse findings for the city’s 2021/22 financial year. Another was to catch up with its ongoing debt with Eskom, he said.

“We are in a cash crunch. We owe Eskom money, which has an effect on service delivery. There is also absolute havoc caused by stage 6 load-shedding on service infrastructure.

“In many communities, once load-shedding ends, the power doesn’t come back on and it destroys service infrastructure, heightens wear and tear on cables, networks and everything blows. Also, cable thieves strike,” he said.

He said the municipality's account with Eskom was still in arrears but it had an open policy with the power utility should it fail to pay.

“We have to get up to 96% of current collection rate and we are nowhere near that. Unless we fix that, we won’t be able to get on top of the Eskom bill. We are open with Eskom and if we find in a particular month we won’t be able to make the commitment, we are honest with them.”

TimesLIVE