The City of Johannesburg has set up an outgoing hotline to contact thousands of residents who are battling to get billing issues sorted out.
Thousands of Johannesburg residents have been battling exorbitant and inflated bills for several months, and have been threatened with disconnection if they don't pay up. However, it seems that hope for some is in sight, as the city is now dealing with about 60 000 queries through a dedicated team.
Stan Maphologela, spokesman for the city's revenue and customer relations department, says a hotline has been established to call residents with enquires. He says the outgoing hotline is staffed by 60 people with specialities in various areas, such as billing and property valuation.
Maphologela says about 3 500 outbound calls are being made every day to contact citizens who have queries. Of this amount, the team reaches about 60% of people, he says. By Tuesday this week, the hotline had made some 10 000 calls in total.
The hotline is also operating as an overflow system for the Joburg Connect call centre, and billing queries are being diverted to the task team, says Maphologela. He adds once the backlog has been dealt with, the call centre number will be made public.
Criminal charges
Johannesburg has about 1.1 million account payers, of whom about 8% have registered queries with their bills. The issues are due to challenges with the post-implementation phase of project Phakama, which migrated the city's disparate systems onto a SAP platform.
One Johannesburg resident this week became so frustrated with the city's inability to resolve the issues that he laid criminal charges against the mayor, Amos Masondo, and head of finance, Parks Tau.
Linus Muller laid a charge against the two top officials for three alleged contraventions of the Municipal Systems Act. He says this was a last resort as he wasn't able to get his, and other, queries resolved, despite mailing top city officials three times.
Maphologela says the city has not been formally approached by the complainant or the police about criminal charges. “We only learnt about this through the media.
“It is unfortunate that this individual went to the police instead of engaging us on whatever grievance he has. We would still welcome direct contact with this person.”
Maphologela says the city's legal department will study the charges and advise on the best way forward once it receives them.
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