Home owners account; Yet another show of lack of services

For two years I couldn’t get a water/electricity/tax bill from the city of Johannesburg. Water and electricity are socialist enterprises here. I didn’t have an account number, nor did I know how much to pay. I tried calling the bureaucrats, but no help there: they said they’d get back to me, but they didn’t.

On September 25th, they showed up to turn off my electricity for failure to pay. The city workers refused to show identification, wouldn’t say whose account they were turning off, and wouldn’t show any legal authorization to do so. In fact, they told me they didn’t have to speak a language I understood (English). I called the police. I have a videotape of these civil servants telling me they aren’t obligated to identify themselves, and that if I refused to allow them on the property they had the right to tear down my gate. When I asked one of them for anything that would show them to be city workers, he replied, “This isn’t America you know.” I know! I know!

I told him, “It’s not Nazi Germany, either.” He later chastised me for running down “Nazi Germany.” “I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t realize you were a Nazi.”

I went to the city hall and waited hours for someone to see me. I was finally told to make a plan to pay the account. I was willing. I had R7,000 (7,000 rand) cash on me. But the bureaucrats wouldn’t let me pay or make a plan. They had forgotten to transfer the account to my name, you see; it was still in the old owner’s name and the bill was going to the wrong address. I was ordered to wait until they changed it over and sent me a statement.

I pay a R700 deposit and go. Two days later they turn on the electricity. Two months later, and still no statement has arrived. I call and call. “I’ll call you back,” they say. They don’t. I keep calling. Finally I get a sour bureaucrat who tells me I’ll have to pay R9,000 immediately and the rest over six months. I asked about the year payment plan. That was discontinued in November. “But I wanted to pay in October and you people wouldn’t let me,” I protest. “That’s your problem,” she says.

Back at city hall, I see another woman who spends the entire time screaming at everyone who comes near her. She screams in the phone. She screams at the switchboard for “bothering” her with phone calls. She informs me that it’s my obligation to pay my account whether or not the city sends me a statement. It doesn’t matter if I don’t know the amount owed. It doesn’t matter if I don’t have an account number to which the money is to be credited. My obligation is to pay an unknown sum into an unknown account, and if I don’t get it right they’ll turn off my electricity.

I got off relatively easy, though. Today’s newspaper told of one man who received an account for R500,000 in water use. The man owns a well and doesn’t even use city water. When he went in to talk to the bureaucrats, they were very sympathetic. They told him to pay 50 percent now or have his electricity cut off.