DURBAN - THE latest report by the administrator of the Msunduzi Municipality detailing the state of the municipality has painted a bleak picture of a municipality that is still battling to stay afloat and deliver basic services, despite having been under administration for years.
The report by the administrator, Scelo Duma, speaks of failure to deliver basic services, such as fixing potholes.
The Mercury understands that the report was tabled before the executive committee last week and is to be tabled again before a full council meeting on Wednesday.
The report has left councillors fuming, saying the intervention (putting the municipality under administration) had not achieved anything on behalf of the city’s residents.
However, city officials said despite there being challenges, the report had not captured what had been achieved to fix the municipality, saying much had been done.
The municipality was placed under administration a few years ago and the intervention had been renewed several times since.
It was revealed recently that the municipal manager, Madoda Kathide, had left the municipality.
Under the heading, “persistent challenges besetting the Msunduzi Municipality”, the report highlights the collapse of key infrastructure such as electricity and water due to poor or inadequate maintenance, age and vandalism.
It found that the electricity infrastructure of the municipality was in a bad state, resulting in frequent and prolonged outages.
“These outages have a disastrous impact on the revenue of the city, economy and the well-being of the residents,” it said.
It said businesses were suffering economically, and there were threats to life as this sometimes impacted on hospitals. Community members also suffered losses when their food was spoiled as a result of the outage.
It lists basic failures that include: failure to attend to the repair of potholes, street-lights and storm water drains; failure to clean the city and the surrounding nodal and residential arrears, including irregular collection of solid state and challenges associated with processing and disposal of solid waste.
It said that the municipality was failing to contain the cost of support services such as security and consultants, and its billing was unreliable.
It also said the municipality had a poorly functioning customer care unit and inadequate communication with business, residents and the public at large.
It was failing to address ill-discipline among its ranks and implement consequence management, it said.
ACDP councillor Rienus Niemand said municipal management should be blamed for the challenge. “With everyone of these things, the situation is going from bad to worse, we cannot blame Covid-19 any more, it’s the management.
“Even with the reports of the administrator, the administrator gives us good reports, but that is the end of the matter, nothing happens afterwards. We are not under administration because we want reports, there has to be action afterwards,” he said.
DA councillor Ross Strachan said the report was repeated what had been reported before.
“What has the ministerial representative (administrator) actually done? And most importantly, what is the actual mandate and powers that have been given to the administrator? Because it seems we have been sent a ‘babysitter’.
“We need someone who is willing to implement decisions and progressive plans or investigations to ensure that we rid ourselves of this culture of mismanagement, corruption and irresponsibility. We need to move forward and not backwards, and this can only happen with a change of personality,” he said.
Khathide said he viewed the report as a status quo report and not a judgement on whether the municipality was improving.
He said there had been a lot of improvements in the past few years, which included addressing service delivery issues. He challenged some of the issues raised by the report, such as poor customer care, saying the city had a very high rate in resolving complaints.
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