Nelson Mandela Bay is bent but not broken and can still be rebuilt

A city bent, but not broken. This is the state of Nelson Mandela Bay, a metro which we love despite its flaws.

The city is bending under the accumulated weight of unmaintained infrastructure and the non-delivery of basic services to communities and businesses, and an economy that cannot reach its potential while its foundational systems remain unreliable. It is bending under the exhaustion of residents and businesses who have learnt to organise their lives around uncertainty: uncertainty about water, electricity, roads, public safety and whether the institutions intended to serve them will respond when they are most needed.

But bent is not broken.

Bent recognises the reality but leaves room for hope and recovery. It refuses two equally unhelpful narratives: that Nelson Mandela Bay’s decline is inevitable and irrecoverable, and that the city is recovering simply because new promises are being announced.

The truth sits in the difficult space between these positions – in the messy middle between a city’s considerable potential and its lived realities.

The municipality’s own numbers should sober us. Unaccounted water losses standing at 63%, and non-revenue electricity losses exceeding 30%. The Auditor-General in its qualified audit outcome for 2024/25 found that expenditure on repairing and maintaining municipal infrastructure amounted to only 2.5% of the value of those assets, against the National Treasury’s minimum norm of 8%.

At the same time the municipality’s irregular expenditure increased from approximately R21-billion to R31-billion over the past two years, resulting it in having one of the highest irregular expenditure records of any municipality in the country.

These figures are not simply technical indicators. They represent public resources absorbed by losses rather than reinvested in services. They ultimately represent development opportunities delayed or denied.

Rights-holders not stakeholders

The challenge before us is not merely to repair a collection of broken assets. It is to reconsider how the City understands the people for whom those systems exist. This means distinguishing between stakeholders and rights-holders. A stakeholder has an interest. A rights-holder has a claim. A stakeholder may be invited to comment on a decision. A rights-holder is entitled to meaningful participation in decisions affecting their life and dignity.

A resident needing reliable water is not merely a stakeholder in a municipal water strategy. A worker sent home without pay because there is no power for the factory to manufacture its goods is not merely an inconvenienced resident. A small enterprise losing income because essential services are unreliable is not simply one voice among many in a consultation process.

These are people whose dignity, livelihoods and opportunities are directly shaped by the functioning – or failure – of public systems. They are rights-holders. In the same way, the municipality is not simply another stakeholder around the table. It is a primary duty-bearer.

Business, organised labour, universities, faith communities and civil society organisations have important interests and capacities. They can be allies, intermediaries, sources of expertise and, in some instances, holders of particular responsibilities. But these roles are not interchangeable with the constitutional and developmental duties of the state. When everyone is described only as a stakeholder, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify who is accountable to whom. A stakeholder asks: Who has an interest in this decision?

A rights-based process asks a deeper set of questions, such as whose rights are affected? Who carries the greatest consequences when the system fails? Who bears the obligation to act? These questions are particularly important in Nelson Mandela Bay because the same institutional failure does not produce the same outcome for everyone.

A household with backup electricity experiences an outage differently from a family without an alternative source of energy. A large company may absorb several days of disruption, but potentially may face the prospect of its international owners closing it down. A township retailer may lose the stock and income on which households depend.

Unity among rights-holders

The system failure may be shared. The capacity to absorb it is not. This is where unity among rights-holders becomes essential.

Unity does not require sameness. It does not mean that residents, workers, business owners, informal traders, young people, faith communities and civic formations must agree on every issue. Nor should unity silence difficult conversations about inequality, race, geography, class or the historical distribution of public resources across the Bay. Unity means focusing on what unites, rather than what divides.

This means agreeing on the minimum terms upon which a dignified City must function, such as: reliable basic services, capable and stable institutions, and mechanisms through which commitments can be monitored and enforced. It also means understanding that the water system, electricity network, industrial economy, natural environment and social fabric of Nelson Mandela Bay are not separate projects. They form part of an interconnected system. Failure in one part transfers risks and costs into another.

The January 2026 signing of a social compact by the Nelson Mandela Bay Civil Society Coalition is therefore a promising development. It brings together organised business, labour, faith-based organisations, civic formations, youth, traditional leaders, education structures and other constituencies around collective action, accountability and the restoration of a functioning metro.

The next step must be to translate representative unity into rights-holder agency. That requires all constituencies to be empowered and have access to key information such as municipal finances, maintenance plans, delivery milestones and areas of underperformance. It requires a credible process through which residents can generate evidence, monitor commitments, escalate issues and receive clear responses.

Justice can exist on paper without dignity being realised in practice. Principles matter, but the real test lies in the tools, processes, terms and conditions through which those principles are implemented. What matters most is what happens on the ground, and how this affects people’s lives.

Justice is not found in how much money is allocated

The same is true of a metro. A municipal budget establishes where resources will flow, which interventions will be prioritised, when investments will occur and who is expected to benefit. Justice is therefore not found only in how much money is allocated. It is also found in the terms of implementation.

The municipality’s March 2026 adjustment budget allocated nearly R680-million to water and electricity infrastructure, including pipelines, pump stations, meters, substations, transformer refurbishment and electrification. This is material and necessary. But an allocation is not yet an outcome. Its public value will depend on implementation capacity, transparency, appropriate sequencing and whether the investment produces a measurable improvement in people’s lives.

Unity among rights-holders should not be interpreted as hostility towards the government.

An organised public can strengthen a capable state. It can identify emerging problems, contribute local knowledge, support ethical public servants, resist political instability and help distinguish between genuine institutional constraints and failures of accountability.

But partnership must not become substitution. Working together cannot mean that communities indefinitely repair what the state is obliged to maintain. It cannot mean that civil society assumes responsibility for public systems without receiving corresponding authority, information or resources.

Collaboration is not the outsourcing of obligation.

Nelson Mandela Bay will not recover through fragmented outrage, consultation fatigue, and politics that asks communities to compete for visibility while systemic failures remain unresolved. Recovery requires organised rights-holders who communicate shared needs, negotiate the terms of change and hold duty-bearers accountable for measurable outcomes. Organised communities are not a threat, but are essential participants in rebuilding public legitimacy and creating a vibrant, balanced and representative civil society.

 A city bent, not broken is both a warning and a proposition.

The warning is that continued underinvestment and institutional instability can harden into structural failure, which in turn results in economic decline and job losses. The proposition is that Nelson Mandela Bay can still reshape its pathway – if its considerable human, institutional, industrial and civic capacities are organised around the dignity and rights of its people, and on balance serve the greater good of the local economy and the quality of life it offers.

The Bay does not need its residents to be managed as stakeholders. It needs them to stand as rights-holders: informed, organised, mutually committed and clear about the terms upon which their city must be rebuilt.

A city bent can stand upright again. But first, its people and the very institutions which are meant to serve them, must stand together. DM