Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality have launched a ‘Pay to Play’ campaign whereas residents who pay their municipal accounts on time will now stand a chance to win a share of prizes worth a half a million rand.
Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday, the metro’s head of Budget and Treasury, Retief Odendaal said the campaign was a first of its kind in the country and aimed to promote a culture of payment for services.
Odendaal said an increase in residents paying their accounts will contribute to an acceleration in service delivery.
The competition is sponsored by the municipality’s service provider EOH, the company aims to assist the metro with debt collection which dropped to 78.8 percent during January 2016.
“We want to send a message out to our account holders those whose accounts are in arrears, to please prioritise municipal accounts. It looks like it’s going to be a fairly difficult financial year in 2017 and that’s obviously going to result in the municipality having to take cognisance of economic factors when we put together our draft budget and traffic increases,” said Odendaal.
The first and second prize up for grabs include 10-thousand-rand and five- thousand rand in cash allocated to each of six clusters made up of ten wards each, these prizes will be drawn at the end of February and March. The grand prizes include two cars valued at R130,000 each and the winners will be drawn at the end of July.
To meet the criteria customer municipal accounts need to be paid in full, customers would need to settle arrears or make an arrangement to do so and finally a debit order would need to be put into place.
The competition closes at the end of June and customers with paid up accounts will be entered automatically.
– African News Agency (ANA)
