City disregards pleas

The City of Windhoek is pushing ahead with plans to charge backdated municipal fees for specific estates and smallholdings within its boundaries.In a public notice on September, City CEO Robert Kahimise announced that the “charging of municipal fees to the extended boundaries within the municipal area of the City of Windhoek” had been resolved.The notice makes it clear that privately developed estates like Finkenstein, Sungate, Regenstein, Omeya and Herboth's Blick, as well the Brakwater area (including its industrial extension), the Nubuamis industrial park and Kempinski “and all other townships within the extended boundaries of Windhoek”, will be charged municipal fees backdated to 1 August. Charges will be limited to rates and taxes and waste management tariffs, with the argument by City spokesperson Lydia Amutenya being that “these people use the same infrastructure as everybody else, so they need to contribute”.In the past, the City council had publically announced its budget in July of each year. While snippets of the budget having been leaked to the press from time to time, this year the council steadfastly refused to make it known, thus denying residents an insight into how the City intends to spend tax collected from the public. “This year our budget first needs to be approved by the minister of urban and rural development. We can only start spending money once he agrees to the budget, but that has not happened yet,” Amutenya said.The City has increased its rates and taxes, as well as all other income charges, between 5% and 300% (in the case of community centres and others), while seemingly being unaware they are overcharging their tax base.This has in the past led to organisations asking the council to write off their debt, especially in the case of kindergartens and other community initiatives which find it hard to collect sufficient contributions from already impoverished communities. In a similar manner, the City has adjusted rates and taxes and all other related municipal charges without approval from their line ministry. In the case of estates, it may be argued that the rates and charges payable by well-off citizens. But ratepayer associations disagree, saying a number of smallholdings in Brakwater are run by middle and even low-income households who choose to make a life on plots outside of Windhoek, because they cannot afford to live in Windhoek itself. “Some of these people have been able to survive in Brakwater, because they have basically been busy with small-scale farming activities, and these plots were previously approved for that type of farming. “They were able to pay the farm tax, but now they face much higher city rates and taxes and are doomed to fail,” a ratepayer association representative said.Amutenya does not accept that argument.However, in the case of the Brakwater community, the smallholder owners face an increase of up to 1 000%.Frank Steffen

City disregards pleas

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-07

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City disregards pleas

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Namibian Sun 2025-07-07

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