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The Democratic Alliance (DA) commends Cooperative Governance Minister Sicelo Shiceka for saying that he will meet the Gauteng Provincial MEC to discuss Johannesburg’s billing crisis. It is high time something was done about the IT collapse that has destroyed the credibility of Johannesburg billing, made city management extremely difficult and has affected the city’s image as a place to live and do business.

But the Minister needs to tell us more. He needs to tell us:

• In terms of which legislation is he intervening, or if not in terms of legislation, on what basis he is intervening;
• whether his meeting with Local Government MEC Humphrey Memezi is as far as his intervention goes;
• how he’s going to fix the billing problem;
• and most importantly, what is the timeline for fixing it.

Minister Shiceka has also been quoted as saying he’s considering new legislation to get SARS to collect municipal revenues. This idea is, frankly, weird. It would amount to centralisation by stealth and would undermine the whole idea of local government. It represents the tendency of this government to propose massive structural changes to deal with the ANC administration’s inability to govern. Municipal rates are collected satisfactorily in many municipalities. In Johannesburg collection has been disrupted by poor project planning and poor implementation. That is a reason to change the people governing Johannesburg, not to change a system that works well elsewhere.