‘Service delivery mess’ — Nelson Mandela Bay fails to spend R152m of maintenance budget

The MEC for cooperative governance and traditional affairs (Cogta) in the Eastern Cape, Zolile Williams, has admitted that the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality (NMBM) failed to spend R152-million of a R497-million maintenance budget in the past financial year.

Despite this, the metro still ran up a loss of R1.58-billion.

Read more: Nelson Mandela Bay metro runs up a loss of R1.58bn — and hasn’t even paid its phone bill

Williams was answering a question in the provincial legislature from Retief Odendaal, who will be the DA’s mayoral candidate for the city in 2026.

“With 10,000 streetlights out across the city, residents are fearing for their lives as criminals take advantage of dark streets. Children are forced to play in sewage-filled parks, and thousands of litres of water are lost to leaks every single day. Power and water outages are a frequent occurrence, causing businesses to shed jobs,” said Odendaal.

He said he had asked for an urgent intervention and gave Williams until next week to respond.

In his response, Williams said there wasn’t much that he could do about the situation.

“The department has conducted risk-adjusted strategy (RAS) workshops with NMBM senior officials and councillors, with the aim of improving infrastructure grants spending together with maintenance prioritisation.

“The RAS working group has since been established, and monthly meetings are held to track performance on grants expenditure and associated plans.”

Williams said the metro reported directly to the National Treasury.

“The NMBM is one of the non-delegated municipalities, meaning it reports straight to the National Treasury. This makes it difficult for Cogta to monitor, conduct any infrastructure audits or condition assessments,” he said.

Odendaal said, “It is plain for everyone to see that there is a service delivery mess in this city, impacting … every single resident in various ways, and yet this negligent government can’t even spend its own budget on repairing and maintaining critical infrastructure.

“This is made worse by the fact that the municipality is losing critical skills with a number of senior engineering vacancies and resignations. The latest loss, Senior Engineer Tholi Biyela, is another nail in the service delivery coffin.”

Odendaal said the unspent R152-million could fix every one of the 10,000 faulty streetlights across the metro, or it could be put towards upgrading a substation or wastewater treatment plant to prevent power outages and sewage spills.

“Instead, the money will not be spent on service delivery as it will probably need to be sent back to the National Treasury.”

City manager

The metro is in the hands of its 17th acting city manager/city manager since 2016 and the 15th since 2020. On Tuesday, the metro council met to discuss the situation, as the current acting city manager, Ted Pillay’s six-month contract is ending. Lonwabo Ngoqo was later announced as acting city manager for a three month period. 

The council also discussed the creation of a Project Management Unit to make sure that conditional grant money is spent correctly.

A report sent to the mayor six months ago warned that supply chain management in the city was in chaos.

The situation had, according to the report, become so bad that money from the Expanded Public Works Programme was used to employ people in the Department of Public Works. The metro has not yet commented on this or answered questions on how the situation is being rectified.

Late last week, Cogta Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa met with business, church and civil society leaders to discuss the situation in the metro. DM