(eThekwini Municipality)
Durban and Johannesburg residents and property owners are fuming over proposed property rate, electricity, water and sanitation tariff hikes, saying they face an affordability crisis and that their cities’ crumbling services delivery does not warrant the increases for the 2025-26 financial year.
Both the eThekwini Ratepayers Protest Movement (ERPM) in Durban and the Johannesburg Property Owners and Managers Association (JPOMA) have filed formal objections to proposed increases in the eThekwini and Joburg metros, revealing a groundswell of frustration as households buckle under the high cost of living, and a perceived lack of municipal accountability.
The ERPM is outraged by eThekwini municipality’s draft budget for 2025-26, which proposes tariff increases of 6.5% for property rates, 12.72% for electricity, 15% for water, 13% for sanitation and 9.9% for refuse collection, when consumer inflation is at 2.7%, according to Statistics South Africa’s data for March.
“We hereby register a formal and unequivocal objection to the proposed tariff increases outlined by the eThekwini municipality. In the context of a deepening affordability crisis, increasing resident debt, and ongoing failures in service delivery, ERPM finds these proposed increases both indefensible and unsustainable,” the movement’s chairperson, Asad Gaffar, wrote in its objection letter.
He described ratepayers’ grievances as encompassing an affordability crisis that leaves residents unable to meet existing service costs, escalating debt levels that risk locking households into prolonged financial hardship, service delivery failures marked by “contractor irregularities” and “questionable municipal spending” that eroded public trust.
“The municipality has not demonstrated how prior tariff revenues have been applied to deliver on the Integrated Development Plan (IDP). In the absence of financial transparency, any request for increased revenue is unacceptable,” Gaffar wrote.
Ratepayers also called for tighter oversight of contractors, and a formal role for ratepayers in approving municipal projects.
“We will not accept continued financial burdens on residents without accountability, transparency, and meaningful reform,” Gaffar wrote.
This week, he told the Mail & Guardian that the movement was also demanding a moratorium on tariff hikes, because many pensioners,and people who had lost their jobs were already in a collective R30 billion arrears.
“It’s one of the reasons the city is struggling to collect revenue. Most individuals are in debt because they have no other choice. They cannot pay for services. Anyone who’s in debt makes a psychological choice. When that amount is affordable or unreasonable, they just simply ignore it and wait for the consequence,” Gaffar said.
“That’s exactly what’s happening with people at the moment, they have a choice between buying food or paying for services and, in most instances, they can’t even afford to pay for services.”
He said the city needed to reexamine how it determines who qualifies as indigent in terms of tariff exemptions because many unemployed or retired people live in homes over a certain value and are excluded from these tax breaks.
“The municipality is then saying ‘if you can’t afford to pay for services then sell that house and move somewhere else’. The question is: move out and go somewhere else, where?
The fact that the employees of the city themselves cannot afford to pay for services, tells you there’s a problem.”
The city’s budget consultation process was also inadequate, Gaffar said.
“The municipality doesn’t understand what public participation means. They simply come there, tell you what they’re doing. They tell you what the budget figures are and, more often than not, the individuals at the meeting start to complain about services.
“What the municipality does is have these meetings more often than not in areas where there are no working citizens. They use that to say, ‘of the 100,000 people who attended these budget meetings, 5% will complain’.”
eThekwini mayor Cyril Xaba announced a 50% cut in arrears debt owed to the city subject to conditions including that debtors settle the balance in full to obtain the discount.
eThekwini spokesperson Gugu Sisilana declined to comment on the movement’s objection.
“We are not going to single out any ratepayer association by discussing their objections as the city conducted budget /IDP roadshows across the length and breadth of the city and is considering all objections/comments received,” she said, adding that the outcome would be communicated during a full council meeting.
In Johannesburg, the city’s draft budget for 2025-26 proposed increases of 4.6% for property rates, 12.41% for electricity, 13.9% for water and sanitation and 6.6% for refuse removal.
The JPOMA, which represents property owners and managers serving more than 250 000 residents, primarily in affordable rental housing in the inner city, said in its formal objection that the increases were “economically unsustainable, and contrary to principles of affordability and equity”.
The association raised concern about policy changes, particularly the restriction of the R300 000 residential threshold rebate to a single property per owner.
“This change will disproportionately affect affordable housing providers,” the association’s general manager, Angela Rivers, wrote in the objection letter, noting that “the financial benefit of the rebate does not accrue to the property owner as profit”.
“Instead, it subsidises operational costs and allows landlords to maintain below-market rentals for low-income residents,” she said.
Without the rebate, tenants faced higher rents, risking “displacement and affordability collapse in formal rental housing”.
Equally contentious was the proposed “non-maintenance” penalty tariff, which the association said was “flawed and likely unconstitutional”. The tariff aims to charge properties deemed “not maintained” rates of six times the standard residential rate.
The association has warned that the proposal risks accelerating the decline of the inner city, “with knock-on impacts for crime, unemployment, and spatial inequality”.
“This violates the principles of administrative justice,” Rivers said, warning that it could punish owners of hijacked or distressed buildings, chilling investment in urban regeneration.
She added that Johannesburg faced a housing backlog of more than 459 000 units and the city could not afford to alienate the very sector helping to address this shortfall.
The association objected to the 12.41% increase in electricity tariffs and the introduction of a R130 or R200 per-unit network capacity charge for electricity reseller buildings.
“The imposition of this charge undermines the policy rationale for the reseller model,” it argued, noting that it amounts to “double-recovery” because property owners already cover infrastructure costs.
Data from the association’s member buildings shows tenants consume an average of 98-159 kWh a month, Rivers added, well within the low-usage threshold, making the fixed charges “regressive” and “disproportionately burdensome” for low-income households.
The association is working on an affordable housing tariff for presentation to the Johannesburg Work Stream set up by President Cyril Ramaphosa to tackle the city’s problems, Rivers told the M&G.
She said there was little transparency on how public input is processed or incorporated into final decisions, “which makes it difficult to assess the true impact of engagement” with the city.
“Until the final tariffs and IDP are published, we can’t say whether our comments were meaningfully considered. Public consultation is only sufficient if it leads to real results — and for that, we’ll have to wait and see,” Rivers added.
City of Johannesburg spokesperson Nkosana Lekotjolo did not respond to the M&G’s request for comment on these objections but pointed to budget documents highlighting the tariff increases, saying the budget speech would be presented next week.
Comparing these costs across three major metros, eThekwini has imposed the highest property rates increase at 12.9%, nearly double Johannesburg’s 7.5% and above Cape Town’s 7.9%. For electricity, Durban leads with a 12.72% hike, followed by Johannesburg at 12.41% and Cape Town at 2%, markedly lower than Eskom’s national increase of 11.32% for municipal bulk customers.
Cape Town has also proposed several new policies that would see tariffs, such as water and sanitation, rising steeply for mid- to higher-end valued properties as it seeks to link charges to property valuations.
These include water and sanitation tariff increases of 7.3% and 11.1% respectively, with additional fixed charges now based on property value rather than connection size. For example, a property valued at R5 million may face a fixed water charge of R548.87 a month plus usage costs.
A new city-wide cleaning tariff has also been proposed based on property value, replacing its previous property rates funding model.