- AG confirms instability has weakened accountability at City Hall
- Vacancies, acting appointments, and weak controls are hurting service delivery
- DA writes to COGTA MEC Zolile Williams for urgent intervention plan
The Democratic Alliance will write to Eastern Cape COGTA MEC, Zolile Williams, requesting that his department urgently table a Stability and Accountability Intervention Plan for Nelson Mandela Bay, after the Auditor-General confirmed that political and administrative instability has decimated public services in the metro.
The plan must set out what steps provincial COGTA will take to support and monitor the stabilisation of the metro’s administration, the filling of critical executive and senior management vacancies, the capacitation of MPAC and the disciplinary board, the implementation of the AG’s recommendations, and the investigation of unauthorised, irregular, fruitless, and wasteful expenditure.
The Auditor-General’s latest local government audit outcomes report for the 2024/25 financial year, released today, confirms the metro’s service delivery crisis starts with a leadership crisis at City Hall.
The AG found that persistent political and administrative instability has eroded institutional capability, weakened accountability, and disrupted leadership continuity in the metro. The prolonged suspension of the accounting officer, recurring acting appointments, and longstanding vacancies at executive and senior management levels have led to fragmented decision-making and weak ownership of critical controls.
This instability has real consequences for residents.
The metro’s control environment remains weak, the audit committee’s effectiveness has been constrained, recommendations are not implemented quickly enough, and weak consequence management has allowed a growing backlog in addressing unauthorised, irregular, and fruitless and wasteful expenditure.
Although NMB’s audit opinion remained unchanged, the number of qualification areas increased, signalling deteriorating financial management and reporting. The quality of the performance report also regressed significantly, to the point where the reliability of reported performance information could not be confirmed.
It is telling that NMB’s only unqualified audit opinion in recent years, for the 2022/23 financial year, was achieved during the period in which I led the metro, demonstrating that stable, accountable leadership can turn the municipality around.
This means that residents cannot even rely on the municipality’s own reporting to tell them honestly whether services are being delivered properly.
The AG also found that the metro’s finances remain constrained, despite the budget being technically funded. Persistent unauthorised expenditure, elevated debt impairment, prolonged creditor-payment cycles, and continued underinvestment in infrastructure renewal and maintenance are eroding financial sustainability.
The cost of this failure is already visible. NMB recorded R1.23 billion in water losses and R4.53 billion in electricity losses over four years. The AG also identified nine material irregularities, with an estimated financial loss of R99.53 million.
Service delivery failures are evident in deteriorating water infrastructure, inadequate pollution control of water resources, ineffective infrastructure project implementation, and delays in housing delivery.
These findings are why families wait for houses, communities live with sewage and water failures, roads deteriorate, electricity losses climb, and public trust in the municipality continues to collapse.
MEC Williams cannot stand by while one of the Eastern Cape’s most important economic centres continues to be undermined by instability, vacancies, weak oversight, and a lack of consequences.
The DA will therefore request that the MEC provide clear answers on what provincial COGTA has done to address the governance failures identified by the AG, what support has been provided to stabilise the metro, what monitoring mechanisms are in place, and what further action will be taken to prevent an audit regression and further service delivery collapse.
Nelson Mandela Bay cannot afford excuses, acting appointments, weak oversight, and consequence-free failure.
The DA will fight for stable, accountable government in Nelson Mandela Bay that gets the basics right. This means competent leadership, clean administration, working financial controls, consequence management, infrastructure maintenance, and services that residents can rely on.
The choice before residents is clear. Nelson Mandela Bay can continue down the road of instability and decline, or it can choose a government that restores accountability, stabilises City Hall, and gets service delivery working again.