I will never forget the story of Mevrou Anna Jaar published in three annual instalments in a newspaper more than 20 years ago.
The next year, she was very proud to show off the new tap in her yard, and the few square metres of lawn she’d managed to coax from the dry red soil. This was a good story of municipal delivery. The third year, the grass was withering and the tap was chained and padlocked. Jaar could not afford to pay her water and rates accounts, so the municipality had physically locked her out.
The cost of electricity to consumers, like water, is subjected to markups by municipalities that makes power unaffordable to many. What’s happening is that municipalities see basic services as cash cows. Over the years, the tariffs added to Eskom’s basic price have gone up and up to the point they are unaffordable.
In 2020, according to Stats SA, only 59% of households in the country had enough food or were categorised as “minimally” food insecure. Of every 20 households in Cape Town, for example, only eight are regarded as food secure, rising to 13 in Johannesburg and 15 in Nelson Mandela Bay. All municipalities receive funding from the national fiscus, known as the equitable share. The current financial year’s equitable share assumes that R460 worth of free services are provided to households earning less than R3,850 a month. But the funding is unconditional; it doesn’t have to be used for free basic services to the assumed level.
But only one in five qualifying households actually received their free electricity in 2020. And those who have been disconnected from water supply, due to not being able to pay their bills, are not even getting their free basic water allocation.
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