It’s been a wild week for those touched by the #TshwaneYaTima campaign in SA's capital city over the past seven days. I don’t know if it’s my own naiveté or a consequence of narrative dysfunction in our country’s public discourse, but I was genuinely shocked to learn this week about how many major companies in the private sector — particularly big landlords and property businesses — were delinquent in the payment of their Tshwane municipality electricity and water bills.

I was also taken aback by the sheer scale of the thing: arrears amounting to tens of millions and hundreds of millions of rands that have gone unpaid for years at a time, and with no effort on the part of these organisations to pay the city its dues, even as they continued to consume public resources, in bulk, from the grid...