Nelson Mandela Bay municipality needs to be honest over water crisis, rather than shifting the blame

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Dear executive mayor Babalwa Lobishe and acting city manager Lonwabo Ngoqo:

Water is life. It is a basic human right and essential to daily life and economic activity, and yet Nelson Mandela Bay is now losing enough clean water to fill 93 Olympic-size swimming pools, on average, every day.

I write to you publicly, on behalf of the more than 700 member businesses of the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber — businesses that collectively employ more than 100,000 people in the metro, at a conservative estimate.

We are raising a serious concern that a “crisis response” and water savings messages are far from sufficient to address what is a deep infrastructure management crisis in this metro, encompassing water as well as sanitation and electricity.

The municipality itself states in its 2025/2026 mid-year performance assessment: “It is evident that the current strategies to address both water and electricity losses are not yielding positive results.”

Clearly it is time to do things differently since these strategies, interspersed with emergency interventions that come too little, too late in times of crisis, have been accompanied by ever-increasing water losses over several years.

I am a civil engineer with more than 30 years’ experience that includes work on infrastructure across South Africa, in other African countries, and globally.

I believe that this qualifies me to comment on the state of municipal infrastructure in Nelson Mandela Bay.

As a resident who runs a business in Nelson Mandela Bay, I share the frustration of many fellow citizens, some experiencing frequent and prolonged water outages, many doing their best to conserve water — most, if not all, frustrated at the NMB municipality’s apparent inability to rein in unacceptably high levels of clean water lost daily to leaks.

The frustration is shared by the competent engineers, technicians and artisans in the municipality who were acknowledged recently by the president of the Institute of Municipal Engineers of SA, Geoff Tooley, as “executing amazing work with the limited resources available to them” and driving innovation in engineering in response.

They, too, are residents of the city who must experience daily frustrations with the lack of service delivery, yet they are restrained in doing their jobs effectively by not enough hands on deck and lacking the tools, such as vehicles, to do their jobs.

The vacancy rate in water services is 13%, in sanitation 43% and in electricity a shocking 63%.

It is not only ironic, but deeply distressing, that in Human Rights Month and “National Water Month” of March, which the national government has proclaimed to promote water conservation, that the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality’s water losses have risen to over 60% of its treated water.

Last week the metro reported water consumption of 371-million litres per day, on a seven-day average, of which 63% was “lost”.

That equates to 233-million litres extracted from the dams, treated in the municipal water treatment works, that never reached our taps.

An Olympic-size swimming pool requires about 2.5-million litres of water to fill, so 93 of those could be filled by the “lost” 233-million litres.

It is accepted that some losses are unavoidable, some such as water used in fire fighting are unbilled, and that 7,000 leaks and multiple issues of meter tampering, theft and billing inaccuracies cannot be fixed overnight.

However, National Treasury sets a benchmark of “acceptable” water losses at 15-30%, and Nelson Mandela Bay is tracking at double that.

The metro calls the current dwindling dam levels, with availability levels edging close to the critical 30%, “a direct consequence” of below-average rainfall, amid a prolonged drought, and states that “infrastructure alone will not solve the crisis” amid current high levels of water consumption.

However, those dams are also effectively feeding the over 7,000 reported leaks that remain unresolved.

The metro is shifting blame to consumers rather than acknowledging the root cause of the problem, which is years of neglect of maintenance of vital infrastructure and failing to spend readily available funds on capital works to upgrade infrastructure to meet the growing size of the metro.

It is not a case of lack of funds. The National Treasury released a report last week which stated that Nelson Mandela Bay had spent only 3.4% of its capital budget for water management halfway through the current financial year.

This is not the time for pointing fingers and calling back the past to identify who is to blame.

This is the time for the municipality to be honest with its citizens. To take accountability rather than shift blame, and to act with transparency on the true situation and what is being done about it.

We need to see an actionable plan with timeframes and deliverables to reverse this metro’s infrastructure management crisis — not just now in a crisis, but a medium to long-term plan so that we do not face a similar crisis, yet again, in future.

As residents and ratepayers of Nelson Mandela Bay, we deserve no less.

- Loyiso Dotwana is a civil engineer and member of the board of the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber, where he serves as immediate past president.