Africa-Press – Uganda. The National Water and Sewerage Corporation (NWSC) is in pain over Shs19 billion unpaid water bills from government ministries, departments and agencies.
The Managing Director NWSC, Mr Silver Mugisha, said non-payment of water bills by some customers has greatly affected the corporation’s capacity to pay its suppliers of requisite operational inputs like chemicals for water treatment.
He said the corporation relies on collected money from water bills to fund all its activities.
Mr Mugisha also said individuals and the private sector owe the body a total of Shs21 billion. As a result, the corporation’s operations are affected because of close to Shs40 billion in unpaid bills.
He said the corporation is constrained and yet it has to deliver water across the country.
“Remember one of the key inputs for us to produce water is power, so if we give you water and you don’t pay for it, it means we don’t have money to pay for power and if we don’t pay for power, Umeme will be at your door to disconnect your services,” Mr Mugisha said.
Mr Mugisha said although some entities like State House, Ministry of Water have cleared their bills, some entities have totally failed to clear their arrears from July 2022 to March this year.
Mr Mugisha said the corporation plans to disconnect the defaulters if they do not pay their water bills in the coming weeks.
He said:“We are doing this after attempts to heed the Permanent Secretary/Secretary to the Treasury’s directive to consider water bills as first call on quarterly releases has failed. Government institutions, especially Uganda Prisons, Uganda Police Force and Ministry of Defence that have accumulated arrears over and above discount and invoicing threshold approved by Ministry of Finance will be disconnected.”
Adding:“We are going to deal with them individually, but generally, I know that the Ministry of Defence has the highest problem, Prisons are not so bad, they have been trying to do what the PSST tells them also they are not doing so well.”
Mr Frank Baine, the Uganda Prisons spokesperson, said they have always been in arrears due to inadequate funding.
“For prisons, the money that goes for utilities doesn’t even come to us, they cut it from the source, what they allocate is what they cut,” he told Daily Monitor yesterday.
The Spokesperson of Uganda Peoples Defence Forces, Brig Gen Felix Kulayigye, said: “The utilities have been outstanding, they are some of the unfunded priorities we expressed to the budget committee of Parliament. We are interested in paying our bills but constrained.”
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