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Despite months of intermittent disruptions and muddy water across Nelson Mandela Bay, the municipality has spent just a fraction of its infrastructure and engineering capital budget for the 2025/2026 financial year.
It has also only filled three of 73 posts advertised for critical infrastructure maintenance since May.
The department has 483 vacant posts, equating to a 44% vacancy rate.
The city is also on track to forfeit R236m in grant funding, including R110m from the Regional Bulk Infrastructure Grant (RBIG) and R125.9m from the Urban Settlements Development Grant (USDG).
The findings emerged during an infrastructure and engineering committee meeting on Thursday.
Acting executive director Joseph Tsatsire conceded that the directorate’s capital spending remained low, blaming poor contractor performance, challenges surrounding the bulk infrastructure grant and a R110m budget adjustment shifted from the grant.
Tsatsire said the directorate was hopeful that spending would improve once existing commitments were processed but acknowledged that the RBIG had been severely affected by project delays and non-performance.
“The capital budget is currently sitting at 22%.
“There have been several challenges around this, especially from a contracting perspective.
“There has been a reduction of the budget as well, and movement of funds in other line items that are performing, but mostly those that fall under water.
“The biggest component is the RBIG, which we’ve lost unintentionally.
“Obviously, there are several issues that are affecting the non-performance of that grant.”
According to the report tabled by Tsatsire, some of the challenges that affected expenditure include:
- Delays in awarding tenders that closed in the 2023/2024 financial year;
- Budget and treasury’s turnaround time to approve bid committee items;
- Bid committees not meeting regularly due to no quorum;
- Supply chain management delays in actioning the resolutions from the office of the city manager;
- Late approval of the urban settlements grant and informal settlements grant 2025/2026 financial year business plans by the National Treasury; and
- Significant staff shortages limiting the department’s ability to implement the procurement plan.
DA councillor Dries van der Westhuyzen said the figures painted a bleak picture, noting that between February and the end of May, the department had increased its capital expenditure by only about 6%, despite officials claiming that about 70% of the budget had been committed.
He said the committee had little reason to believe spending would suddenly accelerate in the next few weeks as commitment levels had dropped from 82% in March to 70% in May.
“This capital budget and our grant spending are exceptionally poor.
“I can’t remember at this stage of the financial year that it has ever been this low.
“R110m from the RBIG is going to be given back, with the R126m from the USDG fund that is going to be taken back, which shows that we are not spending our money properly.
“The National Treasury has stated that our metro’s financial position is deteriorating, especially on water service charges.
“Now, not only do we have punitive water tariffs but we are also reducing our [assistance to the poor] water allowance.
“We aim to increase the price of water by 6.5%.
“This is disastrous,” Van der Westhuyzen said.
“That points to a dysfunctional metro and a political governance that is not coming to the party at all.
“It’s time that we accept that the officials are not to blame but the political structure is to blame.
“So if the politicians can’t keep the money flowing, how must the officials keep the water flowing?”
Infrastructure and engineering political head Buyelwa Mafaya pushed back against his criticism, arguing that responsibility for implementing the budget rested with both politicians and officials.
“You cannot separate the two,” Mafaya said, insisting that officials were responsible for ensuring that council-approved budgets were spent as intended.
Meanwhile, officials also reported slow progress in filling vacancies within the directorate, saying only three appointments had been made since May.
Tsatsire attributed the delays to the restructuring of the human resources division and recruitment rules, stating the processes must restart if appointments were not concluded within six months of a post becoming vacant.
“Since our last meeting, which was held in May, there has not been a significant increase.
“Only three appointments were made, and I think that is due to various factors, one being the changes that were introduced within the human resources division whereby staff were reshuffled, so that transition affected the progress.”
During the meeting, councillors also demanded that the water and sanitation operations call centre be converted into a 24-hour call centre as complaints mounted over service delivery failures.
DA councillor John Best said residents were left with nowhere to turn to during power outages and other after-hours emergencies.
Tsatsire said the call centre did not have a manager and was also meant to have four supervisors on shift daily.
“Obviously, there are unfunded positions as well contributing to the inefficiencies of the call centre.
“What we are proposing going forward is a reprioritisation of funding within the institution, funding within the department to actually then employ a call centre manager, which we call a call centre controller, as well as a supervisor for operations.
“We are hoping that would actually improve efficiency out of that.
“We are also proposing that we import additional staff.”
Tsatsire said they also required a generator due to electrical disruptions.
Best launched a blistering attack on the metro’s handling of customer complaints, accusing the administration of lacking the political will to fix a system that he said had deteriorated from “the best call centre in SA to the absolute worst”.
He said residents were routinely unable to report electricity faults because calls were diverted to back-office lines that went unanswered.
The line to the call centre had recently been disrupted after the municipality failed to pay its service provider.
“There is no call centre when there is a power outage,” Best said.
“How ridiculous is that?
“Residents can’t phone and even councillors struggle to get hold of officials.”
Best said one of his party’s priorities, should it take control of the municipality after the local government elections, would be to establish a fully functional 24-hour operations call centre.
Tsatsire acknowledged the shortcomings, explaining that while the municipality still operated a central corporate number, complaints were decentralised and routed to individual service directorates such as electricity and water.
He said the report before the committee dealt only with water and sanitation services, where the call abandonment rate was about 3%, and could not account for the performance of other departments.
Mafaya said a drastic change was needed at the call centre.
“I know for a fact that at times you’ll get complaints from residents that they can’t get through.
“You want to report electricity complaints and they forward you to another line.
“It rings and rings and you’re cut off.
“Then you start again and it rings and rings.
“It’s a problem and it’s something we can’t run away from.”
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