Service delivery protests in Highway towns are taking some ugly turns with the demonstration reaching the doorsteps of the premier’s palatial home and ratepayers in an affluent town going the legal route to extract millions of rands from Durban’s troubled eThekwini Municipality.
Hundreds of angry protesters took their service delivery woes to the heart of ANC Premier Nomusa Dube-Ncube’s secure, high-walled, 10-bedroomed mansion in Hillcrest.
Across the Highway route, ratepayers of Westville, one of the oldest and most established apartheid-era towns, have finally embarked on a costly legal corridor to recoup millions of rands from the City Hall, claiming after consulting with legal and tax experts that the currently R62-billion budgeted municipality had apparently not promulgated rates tariff from 2005 to 2009 failed a four-year possible rebate that could set thousands of hard-pressed ratepayers on the road to recovery from the city’s bleeding of ratepayers and residents for exorbitant municipal cost.
While the president and the ANC KZN has strongly condemned the picketing at the premier’s secluded homestead, a scary incident that went viral on social media platforms, the membership-based Westville Ratepayers’ Association (WRA) are hoping that a massive rates rebate could bolster its coffers, but this ambitious bid may backfire and hit snag because non-member ratepayers say the monies should offset their respective consolidated billing accounts.
Reacting, President Cyril Ramaphosa, said: “We must condemn and resist any and all attempts by anyone to render our society lawless and chaotic. The Bill of Rights affirms that everyone have their dignity respected and protected, free from all forms of violence.’’
Elsewhere, legal action is looming. The once dormant WRA, on a membership drive appealing to ratepayers to cough up R100 per year, has been exploring a rates and tax boycott against the municipality following growing dissatisfaction in the sharp decline of service delivery and proper maintenance of the town.
The WRA has been shopping for pro-deo attorneys to take on the city legally, ironically the city’s legal cost are borne by ratepayers including the city’s long-servicing firm, Shepstone & Wylie – and have attorney Waseem Joosub in their corner.
The WRA then turned to the National Taxpayers Union’s chairman, Jaap Kelder, a veteran of three decades of tackling service delivery issues against municipalities: “As a result of eThekwini not promulgating for four years, the taxes can be reclaimed from the municipality. After that it was up to the ratepayers associations to follow up.”
The municipal law and the Property Rates Act compel the municipality to promulgate rates tariffs every year.
The WRA says it conducted an investigation late last year and discovered that the municipality failed to promulgate rates tariffs between 2005 and 2009.
Sources close to the ANC’s newly-elected KZN executive committee member, Fawzia Peer, said the veteran Westville city councillor, executive head of finance and deputy mayor, had advised the WRA officials that legal route would be costly and that she preferred negotiations and community engagement with the mayor, Mxolisi Kaunda, and the city’s executive committee.
However, looking for any precedent-setting move that could corner the city hall, Vivian Pillay, chairman of the Phoenix Civic Movement, and Ish Prahladh, chairman of the new eThekwini Ratepayers Association and its Reservoir Hills wing, attended the public meeting along with 400 ratepayers.
These are among many ratepayers bodies spread across the Greater Durban-eThekwini Region’s 100-km radius that have been persistently battling the odds against the city’s service delivery setbacks that are watching developments towards a coalition of community-based organisations embarking on legal campaigns against the city.
“We can add weight to our engagement with the eThekwini Municipality to drive action that addresses effective service delivery that we as a community have been forced to manage with increasing frequency in years,” said Pillay.
Rose Cortes, the WRA’s executive member, said the case against the municipality was being refined since the meeting. “We are currently working with our legal team who are drawing up an affidavit in order to officially notify the eThekwini Municipality that they are being challenged. The basis of the complaint was that eThekwini failed to promulgate the metro’s rates from 2005 to 2009, thereby unlawfully billing and collecting ratepayer contributions during that period. We are embarking on established case law. This is a motion that has already been passed in the case of Koster, Derby, Swartruggens Taxpayers versus Kgetlengrivier Local Municipality. What we are doing is applying it to our area.’’
