‘She is stabilising the metro’ — Ramaphosa praises NMB mayor amid service delivery crises

Nelson Mandela Bay Mayor Babalwa Lobishe was at the centre of a public show of support from ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa during his visit to the metro on Monday — just two days before she is due to appear before Parliament’s Portfolio Committee on Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) to face fresh questioning over the metro’s long-standing governance failures.

On Wednesday, May 6, Lobishe is expected to account for a range of issues, including problematic evergreen contracts, senior management vacancies, the controversial leasing of a municipal transformer to a private company, disputed streetlight tenders and chronic underspending of grant funding.

It will be her first appearance before the committee since DA MP and committee member Marina van Zyl laid a criminal complaint against her, alleging that Lobishe misled Parliament during a previous session.

While members of Parliament’s Cogta committee raised serious concerns in March about Lobishe’s ability to effectively govern the metro, ANC president Cyril Ramaphosa struck a markedly different tone during a visit to the Fishwater Flats Wastewater Treatment Works as part of the party’s National Working Committee (NWC) programme.

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“The mayor is doing very well,” said Ramaphosa. “She is stabilising the metro, and it’s one of the wonderful things that we have got a woman who is leading a metro. We don’t have many in the country, and so that, for me, is a great plus.

“And women tend to have a great deal of sensitivity to the issues that need to be embarked upon to improve the lives of our people. So she has been doing very well in terms of attending to some of the issues that have not been attended to.”

He did, however, concede that while Lobishe had, in his assessment, done “stellar work”, he would “like to see much more, better progress, and a faster pace in how they are working on it”.

‘Decisive shift’

The NWC’s visit to Nelson Mandela Bay “marks the beginning of a national roll-out of similar interventions across all metros and secondary cities, aimed at ensuring that service delivery is not only planned, but experienced by communities through reliable infrastructure, improved services and tangible improvements in daily life,” said the ANC secretary-general, Fikile Mbalula.

He said the programme, which incorporated a service delivery oversight visit to key infrastructure and development projects, including housing, water and sanitation, energy, and economic infrastructure, was a “decisive shift from reporting to direct intervention, placing leadership at the centre of service delivery oversight, community engagement and accountability.

“Importantly, the Nelson Mandela Bay visit reaffirmed the central political objective of the programme: to reconnect leadership with the lived experiences of communities. The ANC recognises that service delivery challenges in areas such as water, sanitation, roads, electricity and housing are not abstract issues, but daily realities affecting the dignity and livelihoods of residents.”

Meanwhile, when asked to comment on the state of the city — which he previously described as “filthy” — Ramaphosa said he was not yet in a position to make a definitive assessment.

“I have not gone around the city sufficiently to see whether it’s still filthy or clean or better, so I’m not fully able to comment,” he said. “But we want our people to live in clean cities ... where there’s no rubbish all over. Our people are neat themselves, and therefore they deserve to live in a very well-run city — from an administrative point of view, political point of view and organisational point of view,” he said.

He added that cleanliness was closely tied to dignity and effective governance.

“So cleanliness, as they say, is next to godliness, and therefore we want a city that functions. and that is clean.” DM