EDITORIAL: Joburg’s U-turn on schools

It may have taken a public outcry, not to mention the threat of three lawsuits, but the City of Joburg has now scrapped a ludicrous decision to charge independent schools as businesses.

This would have raised their rates, in some cases by 800%, and forced many to close. Instead, schools will now pay increases of a more palatable 5%, in line with inflation. 

The city says the initial rate hike was at the behest of the department of co-operative governance & traditional affairs (Cogta), after a 2014 amendment to the Municipal Property Rates Act. Yet the way Cogta tells it, cities weren’t instructed to change schools’ rates at all, and were empowered to continue charging them the same as always.

Which casts mayor Mpho Phalatse’s spin on the matter in an entirely different light. Admittedly, Phalatse has been mayor for just nine months. But that the issue reached the point that it did suggests the metro’s blithe attitude to its residents’ increasingly empty pockets has hardly changed at all. Be afraid.