There is a peculiar logic at play in Nelson Mandela Bay municipality.
The municipality and the council celebrate the purchase of new vehicles while the city cannot adequately protect the ones it already owns.
The latest fleet management report shows a problem that goes far beyond ageing workshops and delayed repairs.
It exposes a municipality that continues to lose control of its own assets.
Vehicles are vandalised while awaiting repairs. Parts disappear. Two trucks have reportedly been stolen. Break-ins occur “every week” at municipal depots.
Yet fencing, security upgrades and basic facilities remain stuck somewhere in the procurement pipeline.
This is a governance failure.
The roads and transport committee heard last week that only 851 of the metro’s 1,100 vehicles have tracking devices installed.
That leaves hundreds of municipal vehicles without one of the most basic accountability tools available.
Councillors have repeatedly raised concerns that municipal vehicles are being used for private trips outside the metro.
Every missing battery, every stolen radiator or vandalised vehicle represents money that should have been spent on basic services.
The irony is difficult to ignore.
Residents face higher tariffs while enduring service delivery failures.
But the municipality appears unable to safeguard assets worth hundreds of millions of rand.
This newspaper has repeatedly highlighted similar patterns.
The metro’s refuse collection fleet has suffered from poor maintenance and dwindling availability, leaving communities surrounded by uncollected rubbish.
Delays in filling vacancies have weakened critical services across departments.
Infrastructure maintenance has too often been postponed until systems fail.
The condition of the fleet depots fits into this pattern of reactive management.
The warnings from councillors should not be dismissed as political point-scoring.
DA councillor Rano Kayser’s description of unsafe workshops and unsecured depots paints a picture of facilities that are almost inviting criminal activity.
Fleet officials themselves concede that break-ins are frequent and acknowledge that securing depots would significantly improve operations.
The municipality now faces a simple choice.
It can continue buying replacement vehicles while allowing existing ones to be stripped behind broken fences, or it can finally treat fleet security as an operational priority rather than an administrative afterthought.
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