Acting Minister for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, Nathi Mthethwa, has commended the City of Johannesburg (COJ) for the significant progress achieved in resolving the residents' complaints with regards to its billing system.
A total of 35 535 out of the 60 000 complaints lodged with the city from December 2010 have been resolved so far.
'The COJ is one of the largest cities in the world and the biggest metro in the African continent with 1.2 million account holders and that makes the task of managing such a number considerably challenging. The responsiveness of the city in resolving the residents' queries to the extent that it has is highly commendable', Minister Mthethwa said.
'Considering that the city has over a million account holders and in three months has achieved about 60 per cent resolution of the billing problems, this progress must be applauded as it is happening within a context of an administration that is also dealing with systemic legacy challenges within the IT systems as a result of the fragmented past our cities come from', the Minister added.
In resolving the problems, the COJ put a moratorium on cut-offs on all queries that were not resolved for over 90 days, in addition to an intensive training programme for staff and the suspension of the city's credit control process to fast-track the resolution of all queries that were logged. A total of 55 out of an additional 263 queries the city received through the office of the Public Protector were resolved within 3 days.
'The current status shows that while the figures stated by the media at the beginning of the year may have been exaggerated, remarkable progress has nonetheless been made, even as we acknowledge a few remaining challenges in the resolution of queries. When problems were brought to the attention of the city, the administration developed a clear programme of addressing those and remarkable progress has been achieved in that regard', Minister Mthethwa said.
A preliminary investigation following the public outcry about the city's billing system could largely be attributed to municipal bills erroneously sent to residents during November and December 2010.
In February the MEC for Local Government in Gauteng, Mr Humphrey Mmemezi, embarked on an in-depth investigation in collaboration with the COJ wherein the city further identified the following:
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15 key challenges and within these challenges there were 43 elements the city needed to action urgently.
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Of the 43 elements identified, 24 have so far been resolved and this translates to a 56% resolution rate.
"However, in this regard, a comprehensive training programme with competency testing is underway in the city to ensure that personnel is well equipped to manage the systems so that residents are never faced with the kind of challenges the city was faced with early in the year",Minister Mthethwa said.
The city also reconfirmed its commitment to improving and enhancing communication with residents of the city, engaging customers regularly and improving turnaround times for customer queries. It has also emerged that the COJ needs a minimum of six months to resolve all outstanding queries.
MEC Mmemezi said his department, the national CoGTA department, the Public Protector and the City of Johannesburg will continue to work together to ensure that the billing problems are resolved permanently.
Source: Department of Cooperative Governance and Tradition Affairs
