Joburg rates will rise in July
Moraka said the city's financial footing was still fragile but with the plans the city had communicated to the National Treasury regarding its collections, managing of water and electricity losses, and expenditure, he was confident the city would see a full financial recovery in the medium term.
'We are still stable, and you can see this with our credit ratings. Even your banks are still investing in the city in terms of loan funding and capital expenditure. We would want that to move forward and ensure that we are liquid sufficiently and be able to reinvest our own cash into our infrastructure.'
He conceded that the size of the city posed a challenge, indicating the capital expenditure budget should ideally be sitting at R15bn.
'At the moment, we are limited in terms of what we can invest and that is the reason that we are in talks with DPSA (department of public service & administration) to look at off-balance sheet investments. Big metros, in particular Cape Town, eThekwini and ourselves, are self-reliant in terms of where we are going to get funding.
'Whatever plans we have as the City of Johannesburg we rely on tariffs and the collections thereof. We do not have the luxury of SOEs (state-owned enterprises) in terms of bailouts and the like. Understanding the terms and where the city is coming from when we set these tariffs is quite important.'
Moraka criticised the outcry over tariff increases, particularly for water and electricity.
'Eskom is the generator of electricity and we are a distributor, we've got the distribution networks. As a generator, their tariff increase has got an impact on what we set as the distributor. If the tariff approved by Nersa is 12.74% for the generation of electricity, then the city has to set a cost-reflective tariff.'
He said they decided not to increase tariffs at the same rate, saying this was the result of key deliberations with the Treasury.
'In their view, we should increase at the same proportion as what the bulk generators increase by. But our argument was that we are already seeing an overburdened resident and business in the City of Johannesburg and we must plough back into their interests and ensure efficiencies within our own systems. So whenever there are leakages, we must intervene.'
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