6 March 2025
Ingrid Smith has been battling to pay the R1,350 monthly rent at her apartheid-era council flat in Actonville, Benoni. She owes the City of Ekurhuleni more than R110,00. Photos: Kimberly Mutandiro
Since her husband’s death three years ago, 75-year-old Ingrid Smith has been battling to pay her R1,350 rent each month at her apartheid-era council flat in Actonville, Benoni. Smith now owes the City of Ekurhuleni more R110,000 for rent, water and electricity.
Smith is among dozens of pensioners at the flats who have fallen behind on their rent and utility bill payments. According to the City of Ekurhuleni, residents at the Actonville flats owe the municipality about R33-million.
Tenants are complaining that the City has been routinely cutting off their water and electricity because of the outstanding payments. They want the City to give them title deeds for the flats because, they say, most of them have lived there for decades.
Smith says before her husband’s death in December 2022, the couple managed to pay their rent and some of their bills, using their pension grants of more than R4,000 per month. But now there’s only Smith’s grant of R2,210 which she says isn’t enough to survive on and pay rent.
“It’s difficult to live in these flats,” she says. “The government should consider us pensioners and wipe all our debts.”
She complained that the City had abandoned them by not adequately maintaining the flats which are in a poor state. There are about 11 blocks of flats where more than 500 mostly low-income families live.
Residents previously protested, asking for their electricity meters to be unblocked, for their debt to be cancelled, and for the municipality to maintain the flats. After the protest, residents received letters from the City, inviting those in arrears to make payment arrangements. However, some residents claim that local municipal staff were not friendly, and that some of them had to pay R5,000 to unblock their meters, which they cannot afford.
Community representative Agnes Phindi Mwale, 65, said many people have received high rental bills since the start of the year. She said they don’t understand how the bills are calculated or where they’ll get the money to pay them.
Mwale’s debt is currently over R200,000. The municipality blocked her electricity meter over a year ago and asked her to pay R20,000 to have it unblocked.
The City’s rental flats, which tenants say are neglected.
“I have tried to borrow money to pay, but I could not keep up. We want Ekurhuleni to scrap all our debts and ask us to pay R300 a month, instead of torturing us,” she said.
City of Ekurhuleni spokesperson Zweli Dlamini said the City met the tenants in August 2022, and offered them “affordable payment arrangements”. Dlamini said the tenants’ debt had accumulated over years.
He said they had been charged market-related rents until September 2022. Now they are charged at lower tariffs. “Community members were advised to enter into payment arrangements for outstanding debts, which some have done so, but others have still not,” said Dlamini. He said the City did not have a policy that allowed the write-off of debt for rental units.
According to Dlamini, debt rehabilitation had been offered, where tenants could write off debt gradually, “provided that the current account is paid”. He explained that services had been disconnected in line with the City’s credit control and debt collection policy.
Actonville tenants, Enid Singh, Agnes Phindi Mwale, Angela Pillay and Sylvia Rose want the City to scrap their debt.