They keep calling the plumber but the pipes are still burst

Let me ask you something. If you called a plumber and the leak wasn’t fixed, would you call the same plumber again? What if you’d called him four times? What if every single time he showed up, he wrote a report, told you the pipe needed fixing, got paid and left the leak exactly as he found it?

That is Nelson Mandela Bay’s state of affairs in a nutshell.

Twenty years of rescue, zero results

Since the early 2000s this metro has been on the receiving end of a parade of national government support programmes. Project Consolidate in 2004. Siyenza Manje in 2006. Operation Clean Audits in 2009. Back-to-Basics in 2014. Each came with fanfare and promises.

Each quietly disappeared, leaving the same broken services behind. What is less remarked upon is that the interventions sent to fix the city have met precisely the same fate as the rubbish they were dispatched to clear, piling up unprocessed, each one overtaken by the next before the last was properly dealt with.

And then came the Section 154 teams, the constitutional heavy artillery, reserved for municipalities in serious distress. Nelson Mandela Bay has had four of them. Four, in a single decade. The latest, a 10-member team from the Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs, landed in December 2025. Ratepayers have every right to ask: what exactly have we been paying for?

Conservative back-of-the-envelope calculations place direct intervention spending in Nelson Mandela Bay between R350-million and R500-million over 20 years and that figure doesn’t touch the cost of the service failures themselves: unprocessed waste, illegal dumping clean-ups, emergency contracts and infrastructure backlogs that compound with every year that nothing gets fixed.

We are talking about a generational bonfire of your rates, lit again and again by the same people who promised to put it out.

Some will quibble with that number. Fair enough, the municipality doesn’t publish a neat and tidy “cost of failure” report. But fixating on whether the figure is R350-million or R500-million misses the point entirely.

In a metro where irregular and wasteful expenditure has ballooned to R31-billion, where a single suspended official costs ratepayers R10-million, and where infrastructure grants expire, unspent, while streets fill with rubbish, the precise size of the intervention bill is almost beside the point. The point is that it is enormous, it has bought nothing, and you paid for it.

Notice the timing, it’s not a coincidence

Here’s something the official press releases won’t tell you: almost every major intervention has arrived six to 12 months before a local government election. The cycle is familiar whether by coincidence or design: crisis erupts, an intervention team deployed, politicians look busy, the election happens, cameras leave, services collapse. Repeat. This is not municipal administration. This is a magic show. And we are the audience that keeps buying tickets.

The municipality doesn’t think you’re a customer, they think you’re lucky

This municipality does not see itself as a service provider. It sees itself as a charitable organisation acting at the behest of its political principals. When your rubbish gets collected, they act like they’ve done you a favour. When a pothole gets filled, it’s an event worth a ribbon and a photo op. You are not a grateful recipient of municipal benevolence. You are a paying customer. You pay rates. You pay tariffs. In return, you are legally entitled to functioning services. That is not a handout. That is a contract. And this municipality has been in breach of it for 20 years.

The Umgidi moment – read this carefully

In January 2023, with R104-million in water infrastructure grants at risk of being clawed back and R143-million in housing grants expiring, the municipality spent R400,000 on an Umgidi celebration, justified as a “mental health intervention”. This is the same municipality that cannot find the money to collect your rubbish.

And then there is the city manager situation. Dr Noxolo Nqwazi was placed on precautionary suspension in October 2023 for allegedly breaching the Municipal Finance Management Act and Municipal Systems Act.

She was also arrested over her alleged role in the approval of a R24-million tender for toilets in informal settlements. The tender – awarded during the Covid-19 National State of Disaster – was later flagged by the Special Investigating Unit.

She has drawn R6.7-million in salary, paid in full, month after month, while the disciplinary process dragged on. But that’s not even the whole bill. The City cycled through acting city managers: Mandla George (R1.2-million, 2024), Ted Pillay (R1.49-million, 2025), plus R882,000 in legal fees.

The total cost of this single suspension has topped R10-million, with the meter still running enough to buy a fleet of garbage trucks, clear dozens of illegal dumping sites or fund the infrastructure maintenance deferred every year because there’s “no budget”. Instead, it paid for two and a half years of administrative theatre while irregular expenditure ballooned from R21-billion to R31-billion.

They knew – they just stopped caring when no one was watching

Nelson Mandela Bay had a formal Strategy for the Elimination of Illegal Dumping, adopted in 2010, right before the Fifa World Cup. When the world’s cameras were on Port Elizabeth, this city cleaned up. Streets were swept. Dumps were cleared. Then the final whistle blew, the cameras moved on, and within months the illegal dumps crept back and the strategy was shelved.

This is not incompetence. This is a choice. The municipality knows how to deliver services. It just doesn’t bother unless someone important is watching. If you live in Bloemendal, you know the punchline: after a World Cup and four Section 154 interventions, the rubbish dump is still the most reliable landmark in the suburb.

Stop waiting for the lorry, because it’s not coming

Here is the hard truth no politician will say out loud: the system is not broken. It is working exactly as designed, to generate press releases, deploy teams and produce enough visible activity to get through the next election.

It is not designed to collect your rubbish. The fifth intervention team will fail, just as the first four did, because no 10-person government team can dismantle from the outside an architecture built around avoiding accountability. That work starts from the inside. And the people who matter most on the inside are not the politicians. They are us.

What self-reliance actually looks like

I am not saying give up. I am saying grow up as a citizenry. Waiting for the municipality to fix itself is like waiting for the drunk driver to self-correct. At some point you take the keys. Self-reliance means organising ward by ward so ratepayers have the collective power to demand accountability. It means documenting every service failure.

It means using GPS-based reporting, ward committee structures, Public Protector complaints and the Auditor-General’s public findings to make it more uncomfortable for the municipality to fail than to deliver. We paid for this city. Two decades. Countless interventions. The same rubbish piles. The lorry is not coming. Build something better and force this municipality to justify its existence. DM