Dust around City debt write-offs won’t die down

DELIBERATIONS by the City of Windhoek council on whether or not to approve the suggested writing off of N$13,4 million in unrecoverable debt may only return to the public sphere around March, after a decision last week to collect more information from the City’s finance department on the various debtors in question.

Special Executive for Finance in the Windhoek Municipality, Roger Gertze, said on Friday that, following the council’s deferral of the matter on Wednesday night, the finance department was asked to compile detailed dossiers on the clients in question, to be provided to council upon completion.
This mission, Gertze said, is expected to last at least two months.
Gertze also pointed out that N$5,7 million of this amount, which has already been closed at the City’s attorneys, has not yet in fact been written off as was reported in The Namibian on Friday, but also awaits approval from council.
The topic sparked tension during last week’s monthly council meeting, as councillors objected to the appearance of a number of well-established companies and organisations among those whose debts are to be written off.
The municipality has often in the past been blamed for the eviction of pensioners from their homes due to unpaid municipal accounts, a fact noted during the discussions.
Calls to some of the municipality’s troubled clients over the weekend proved indicative of the City’s difficulties in tracing them.
An example is Pizza Den, whose records show it owes the municipality N$13 039 for an erf in Klein Windhoek.
Giovanni Cagetta, who took over the business in 2003, denies that it has anything to do with him. He says the previous owner racked up the debt.
Spokespersons or responsible officials with the African Methodist Episcopal church could not be reached, despite calls to various bodies who merely claimed affiliation to it.
In the City’s remarks about why an outstanding N$1 338 could not be recovered from the church, it stated that requests for payment received ‘no response from client’.
The owner of Dannic Construction, Nicholaas Pienaar, could also not be reached on his cellphone over the weekend.
Dannic Construction is expected to score on two separate accounts, in total amounting to N$56 791 apparently because of mistakes made on the part of the municipality.
‘We cannot just accept an explanation that some of these debts must be written off due to mistakes on the part of the municipality,’ Benestus Kandundu, councillor for the Nudo party and the person who requested the deferral last week, told The Namibian on Friday.
The City plans to write off N$10 million owed by clients, with the exception of clients currently being followed up with the Credit Bureau and a newly created ambulance account – which records losses incurred as a result of incorrect or insufficient information collected from people making use of the municipality’s ambulance service.
– denver@namibian.com.na