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City eases pensioners’ worries

The City of Windhoek is allocating N$20 million to bad debts incurred by pensioners and welfare/disability persons, the municipality announced this week at its monthly council meeting on 30 April.
At the meeting, one of the councillors urged pensioners and welfare/disability persons to keep their payments up to date after the City’s finance division wrote off previous debts. The councillor said this is a once off effort by the municipality and will not happen again.
Last year, pensioners and persons receiving a welfare/disability grant were urged by the City of Windhoek to register with the municipality in order for their debts to be written off; 483 pensioners and 80 welfare/disability cases were registered for the once off exercise.
The City said that since the first exercise where the debts of pensioners were written off, there were instances where pensioners/welfare clients were disconnected because failing to pay their accounts.
The municipality appealed to pensioners and welfare/disability persons to keep their current accounts up to date.
The outstanding debts as at 29 February 2012 will be paid off. The meeting recommended a complete write off for the pensioners and welfare individual accounts.
The meeting also recommended that the strategic executive of finance should come up with a proposal on other initiatives and qualification criteria under which debts owed by pensioners and welfare/disability cases should be written off and that they investigate failures to payment.

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