The team tasked with pulling Nelson Mandela Bay back from the brink has hit a wall of resistance from within the municipality, with officials accused of blocking efforts to reverse years of governance and financial decline.
This is according to Eastern Cape co-operative governance MEC Zolile Williams.
He said that some officials were frustrating efforts to turn the metro around, accusing them of hampering a national intervention designed to restore governance and financial discipline.
The Section 154 team was deployed to the city in December by Williams' department.
The MEC and deputy co-operative governance minister Dickson Masemola held marathon meetings on Wednesday with the Section 154 team and the Bay’s top political leadership.
They later met mayor Babalwa Lobishe’s mayoral committee.
Speaking after the briefing outside City Hall, Williams said that, as things stood, there was no stability in the metro.
“What you see is elements of resistance within departments because there’s no city manager who can enforce anything upon the officials.
“There’s resistance to the intervention team that we’ve placed here, and we feel that it requires a properly appointed city manager to drive those processes so that they can be changed.
“One of the issues I can tell you is that if the city can accumulate irregular expenditure close to R8bn and more, it shows you that whatever the team is doing, there is no positive response to the work that is being done by the team because, at the end of the day, municipal officials must implement those issues that are raised by the team.
“Our team here has raised about 101 issues that need to be attended to immediately, but there’s no progress in implementation, which is why you need a city manager as in yesterday.
“The R8bn [in] irregular expenditure has been accumulating as we calculated, in the past two years.
“If you remember, it was R21bn. It has increased to about R31bn, and it’s unacceptable.
“That’s why the National Treasury is making threats that they will stop grants to this municipality if there’s no action on the irregular expenditure.
“But now the team has tried to unbundle the irregular expenditure to work on it.
“It requires internal management to try to work on those matters.”
In April, Williams wrote to the city, saying Noxolo Nqwazi should be reinstated as city manager because her precautionary suspension had lapsed.
He said she had earned R6.7m while sitting at home.
Williams said this did not translate to good governance.
“It’s now two-and-a-half years that Nqwazi has been out of office.
“Action must be taken as that’s the right thing.
“If you discipline Nqwazi, you then have space to appoint a municipal manager permanently.”
The municipality has had multiple acting city managers since Nqwazi was placed on precautionary suspension in February 2024 for allegedly breaching the Municipal Finance Management Act and the Municipal Systems Act.
Nqwazi, who has denied wrongdoing, also faces criminal charges over her alleged role in the approval of a R24m toilet tender which was awarded during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Masemola promised to return to the city in July for a two-day engagement that would include all councillors.
The Section 154 team has prepared a situation analysis report on the municipality, which he said would be interrogated, as well as a report from the mayor.
The team warned that years of governance failures, weak financial controls, infrastructure neglect and leadership instability had pushed the municipality into a deepening crisis marked by water losses, failing sewerage systems, deteriorating roads, rising debt and recurring audit failures.
“Our interest is to stabilise the city,” Masemola said.
“We have just communicated a message to the leadership that there’s nobody that will come and stabilise the city except themselves.
“We can put in place Section 139.
“But the point is Section 139 can’t replace the 4,000 Nelson Mandela Bay workers.”
Section 139 allows for provincial intervention in struggling municipalities, which could ultimately result in the dissolution of the municipal council as a final measure.
“We’re on track to strengthen the Section 154 team.”
Masemola said ongoing tensions among members of the ruling coalition and internal political divisions were contributing to the municipality’s governance challenges and complicating its management structures.
“But these issues are not insurmountable. We do have an appreciation of the fact that politics requires management.”
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