Municipality walks financial tightrope

THE most contentious decision of Nelson Mandela Bay’s coalition partners to date has been the imposition of reconnection fees on thousands of residents who accumulated arrears on their consumption accounts and found their services terminated as a result.

Officials were shellacked and accused by opposition parties of targeting the poor. Now, no doubt indigent folk were among the defaulters, as much as there were those who could afford to pay.

Either way, the municipality stuck to its guns on what was clearly an unpopular decision. The entire saga exposed the tightrope this, and presumably most local authorities, negotiate each day to ensure that, on one hand, the provision of services reaches even the poorest of the poor while, on the other, the municipality is kept on a sound financial footing.

No easy task at the best of times . . . and these are not the best of times.

A similar conundrum now looms insofar as the metro’s stance on poor households is concerned. The decision last year to expand the municipal welfare net to cover another 23 000 families has come at considerable cost.

And not just the additional R428-million envisaged prior to the elections when the decision was made to expand the city’s Assistance to the Poor programme, but some R160-million more, that, according to City Hall, now threatens to wipe out the administration’s cash pot.

The problem appears to be the haste with which the net was cast wider. Among the new beneficiaries of the revised policy, we are told, were as many as 10 000 paying account holders.

It’s clear retrospective verification must now take place, for two reasons. One, failure to ratify deserving beneficiaries means the additional cost burden inevitably falls to other ratepayers.

Two, the municipality cannot fund its social programme. And it is on this count, ironically, that the poor will suffer most.