Inundated with strays and unwanted pets, the Uitenhage SPCA is drowning in debt as the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality allegedly continues to default on its payments to the pound.
SPCA chair Deirdre Swift said the municipality owed it about R150,000 for operational costs.
Sometimes the non-profit organisation has to wait six months for the municipality to pay it.
In the meantime the organisation faces hefty bills.
As per its contractual agreement with the municipality, the organisation manages the pound.
The municipality is responsible for the costs incurred.
These include salaries for three staff members.
However, the municipality had been defaulting at its end of the agreement, Swift said.
She said the organisation had not been paid for six months and received payment only in September for services rendered from January to June.
Payments for July and August were made in November.
The agreement is that the municipality paid the SPCA within 30 days of billing, she said.
“We are in a very difficult position because [when] they don’t pay us we are forced to use donations we get from the public to pay bills that the municipality should be paying.
“Sometimes we can’t pay our staff who are breadwinners, because we have huge bills and additional staff to pay,” Swift said.
When the organisation used donated funds to pay the municipality’s bills, their budget for maintenance, fuel, staff salaries fell short, she said.
“We have huge bills with our medical suppliers and our vets because we have to acquire vaccines and treatments for animals on credit,” she said.
Municipal spokesperson Mthubanzi Mniki said on Friday the municipality was catching up with payments owed to service providers.
He said the SPCA had been reimbursed after Covid-19 lockdown related delays.
However Swift said the last payment made earlier in November had not included the outstanding amount of about R150,000.
“We are still facing challenges when it comes to paying service providers within 30 days and it has been worsened by the Covid-19 pandemic because we either function with a skeleton staff or people work on rotation.”
Asked what had caused delays before the lockdown, Mniki said there were several factors including late invoices and misunderstandings that resulted in invoices being sent back and forth.
“There are a number of reasons that invoices sometime get delayed, sometimes from our side and sometimes from theirs.
“The length of the delay is usually dependent on [what the issue is]," Mniki said.
Swift said the organisation had run out of private funds as a result of the delayed payments.
“With the little bit of money that has come in, we are now up to date with staff salaries.
“But some of our staff are paid weekly and by the end of this month we won’t have enough money to pay them if the money we are owed is not paid by Monday,” she said.
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