The Nelson Mandela Bay municipal budget for the 2025/26 financial year, passed by the ANC/EFF coalition in council today, will bring residents nothing but pain, hastening the city towards economic collapse.
The Democratic Alliance rejected the budget outright, as we are not prepared to support a budget that does not attempt to fix our administration so that we can improve service delivery to all communities.
The DA does, however, welcome some concessions made by the ruling coalition, including a better allocation of resources to some wards that were previously without any budget at all. However, there is still a clear bias in ward allocation budgeting, favouring ANC wards.
For example, ANC Ward 54 received over R109 million, while DA Ward 12 received just R1 million, and ANC Ward 33 received R18 million, while DA Ward 34 received just R1.7 million in allocations.
The administration also buckled under pressure to make slight concessions to the proposed tariff increases on water, sanitation and refuse services, reducing the proposed increases by half a percentage point.
Serious concerns include the evident lack of a turnaround plan to address the Electricity Department’s financial difficulties, which are projected to result in a R1.35 billion loss for the financial year.
Why should residents have to shoulder a 12.8 per cent increase in electricity tariffs if we can’t address the massive losses in the Bay, where an estimated one out of three households have tampered with their electricity meters?
Equally important, the lack of a costed turnaround plan to address our failing engineering services will likely result in ongoing non-revenue water losses, already at 50 per cent. These could easily escalate to another drought disaster for the City in the foreseeable future.
In the current financial year, the metro administration has already forfeited more than R300 million in unconditional grant funding due to an inability to spend.
This means less road maintenance, fewer working streetlights, and more collapsing sewers and water pipes for the people of the Bay.
Put another way, the money the City has forfeited could have covered the rate increases for the entire city, meaning residents would not have had to pay a single cent more for rates this year!
This is why the DA won’t support the 2025/26 budget. You can’t fix collapsing municipal infrastructure without budgeting for the repairs and maintenance, or appointing the necessary engineers and artisans to do the work.
If we want to get NMB working again, you can’t budget for more of the same. In 2026, the DA will fight tooth and nail for control of this city.