adminSukulwenkosi Dube Plumtree Correspondent
Mangwe Rural District Council will be taking legal action to recover more than $500,000 from farmers in the area who are refusing to pay unit tax.
The local authority’s Chief Executive Officer, Nketha Mangoye Dlamini, said lawyers had been engaged to take up the issue.
He said the problematic group comprised A1 and A2 farmers.
“To date farmers owe the local authority over $522,350 in unpaid taxes,” said Dlamini.
He said farmers in the district were expected to pay the gazetted unit tax of $2 per hectare each year, but said most of them stopped paying last year.
“We’ll be taking legal action against our debtors namely farmers, miners and service providers.
“We expected them to have cleared their balances by end of December last year. Our major problem is the farmers who are not clearing their debts as a protest,” said Dlamini.
He said the local authority would engage traditional leaders to help them collect rates from the rest of their debtors.
He said council operations were being crippled by debtors who were resisting payments.
Dlamini said they had so far collected $514,086 out of a projected yearly budget of $2,9 million.
“We’re heading into the last quarter of the year and we’re sitting on a variance of $2,4 million which explains why we’ve decided to act on defaulters,” he said.
He pointed out that the local authority should have collected $45,000 in development levies but they had managed to collect only $5,000.
Dlamini also said they expected to have collected $800,000 for unit tax, building section fee, field, cart and cycle levies but $144,000 had been collected so far.
Farmers have complained that the unit tax was too high.
Mangwe Farmers Association chairperson, Adam Bango, recently pointed out that on average a small-scale farmer had 500 hectares while A2 farmers had 2,000 hectares.
Online Reporter