The bankrupt Emfuleni local municipality is sinking deeper into debt after failing to pay councillors’ and employees’ salaries for May, which were due on Thursday.
Eskom obtained a court order to seize the Vanderbijlpark municipality’s bank account last December to recoup R1.3-billion owed to the power utility.
The situation has been so bad lately that Emfuleni municipal manager, April Ntuli, went to the power utility cap in hand to request that the municipality’s FNB bank account be uplifted so that councillors and other staff members can be paid.
In a letter Sunday World has seen, Eskom’s senior manager of customer services, Mpumelelo Mnyani, told Ntuli on Tuesday that he was taking chances and that he should go fly a kite.
Mnyani said: “It is unfortunate that Eskom has to resort to attachments owing to the failure by Emfuleni Local Municipality to honour any commitments. This highlights the desperate position that the municipality has placed Eskom under.
“You will recall that Eskom agreed to uplift the attachment on the municipality’s accounts in January 2023 under strict conditions that the municipality undertook to honour. To date, none of those conditions have been honoured. To make matters worse, the current account is also not serviced.”
If Ntuli wanted to see the upliftment of the frozen salaries account, the municipality should first pay Eskom more than R380-million, wrote Mnyani.
“Pay an amount of R384 432 497 to bring the current accounts up to date. Provide an undertaking that the current account of R187 914 974 due on 6 June 2023 will be honoured by no later than the due date. Submit to Eskom a duly signed payment arrangement for the settlement of R1.3-billion judgment debt.”
Eskom was also operating under gloomy financial pressure and it could not take chances by providing bulk electricity to Emfuleni without receiving the necessary payments, Mnyani added.
Ntuli was forced to write a letter to all the employees, including MMCs, councillors, political advisers, senior officials and general workers, to tell them that they would not receive their salaries this week as there was no money to pay them.
Ntuli said that Emfuleni’s lawyers had told him that the municipality would not be able to access its bank accounts unless Eskom gave the municipality consent.
“We sincerely apologise for the panic and instability which has been suffered by employees during this time,” said Ntuli.
DA’s MPL Kingsol Chabalala said it was nonsense that Emfuleni was failing to pay its employees’ salaries due to the consequences of financial mismanagement, maladministration and corruption that has brought the municipality to its knees.
“Instead of spending money wisely to ensure that it can pay salaries and deliver services to its residents, Emfuleni continues to outsource services that can be done in-house. These outsourced services include grave digging, grass cutting, refuse removal, fixing water leaks and filling potholes,” said Chabalala.
He warned that employees could down tools and service delivery would suffer. The DA demanded that the Gauteng provincial government urgently intervene. Emfuleni spokesperson Makhosonke Sangweni did not respond to our questions.
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