Municipal woes

The municipality has surpassed even crime as the favourite topic of conversation among city-dwelling South Africans. Try bringing up problems that you might have had with it at a dinner party - it`s like starting off your own little Mexican wave of indignation. Other guests will get increasingly shrill and aggressive in their desire to tell their own horror story.

I have used this column as a forum in which to unload this burning issue before, and to be perfectly frank, the whole topic has become thoroughly boring - as dinner table discussion or article material. I also felt honour-bound to give the council a bit of a break after it publicly admitted its systems weren`t up to scratch and it was overhauling the whole process.

Part of this overhaul was to fire the inefficient outsourcing companies that had been botching basic services like meter reading, and training and hiring new ones. Incidentally, the complaint I aired to the council and in my column nine months ago (a R12 000 water bill) has not been resolved, despite repeated requests on my part, but it does seem like the new meter readers are at least a civil and articulate bunch, if the notes they have been leaving in my post box are anything to go by.

The same cannot, unfortunately, be said for another company to which the council has outsourced some of its services. In fact, I was inclined to leave the council alone altogether, in the interests of generating fresh and interesting columns, but my experience of the past week has filled me with a new nauseating wave of ire, and I have again been given reason to vent my disgust at its services through this medium.

Try bringing up problems that you might have had with the council at a dinner party - it`s like starting off your own little Mexican wave of indignation.

Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

When I arrived home on Friday evening, there was a hand-delivered letter in my post box. It was printed on a letterhead that was obviously produced on a home printer for Fezela Bathungathi Properties, a company of which I have never heard. Its grammar and sense was so badly garbled that I initially thought it was some new form of Nigerian scam.

The Nigerian (as I assumed him to be) had somehow managed to purchase (I deduced) my details from the council and was using them to threaten me. However, in typical Nigerian style, he had grasped the wrong end of the stick completely, and was erroneously using his information in a flagrant and enthusiastic display of his ignorance. The letter informed me that the person to whom I pay rent does not in fact own my house. It went on to schizophrenically instruct me to stop paying the rent, and also to stop collecting the rent, and instead come to their offices immediately to pay the amount that the owner in fact owes the council. I was threatened with eviction and furniture repossession if I did not comply.

What`s really funny about all of this is that I am the owner of my house, and I have no tenant. Granted, the amount that was owing to the council is correct, so I phoned the sender, brimming with conspiracy theories about how he had gained access to my details, to demand that he explain himself. That`s when the fun really started.

The gentleman whose cell number (the company has no landline) was on the letter informed me that he had been approached as a pillar of the community by my prior tenant (also non-existent) because I had not allowed him back onto the property to retrieve his boots after we`d evicted him. After much reasoning, I managed to convince him that this was not the case, and that if it were, what right had he to be accessing my account details at the council?

After a long and protracted discussion, he finally decided that his correspondence with me was instead something to do with the unpaid balance on my account and that he was acting on behalf of the council to extract it from me. "The council has very powerful systems called 'IT` to help us to catch perpetrators," he informed me. As soon as I realised that he had some official grounds for harassing me, I was filled with a chilling sense of horror. My further attempts to request detailed information from him met with accusations of me being anti-ANC and racist. The significance of this, even if it were true, eludes me, as municipal services are not provided on the basis of political affiliation.

At this stage I am scheduling a trip to the council, and certainly not to the offices of Fezela Bathungathi, to try, yet again, to resolve the overcharge. But I am horrified that at a time when the municipality is supposed to be progressing towards the utopian ideal of a functional e-government system, services are instead being outsourced to companies whose inefficiencies are achieving a new nadir with every day that passes.