Africa-Press – South-Africa. Former eThekwini deputy mayor Philani Mavundla laid bare the City’s myriad issues after he quit.
Mavundla, who was the chairperson of the human settlements and infrastructure portfolio for one year, has been vocal about his knowledge of the infrastructure and maintenance failures in the City.
Upon resigning, he gave details about the state of the City and said much needed to be done to repair ailing infrastructure.
Mavundla also joined ActionSA as an amicus curiae (friend of the court) to compel the eThekwini government and other government departments to urgently deal with the sewage crisis in the city.
In a lengthy statement this week, Mavundla, through Abantu Batho Congress (ABC) secretary Phumelele Phahla, said that to his knowledge, the City’s water and sanitation department’s debilitated infrastructure was a “ticking time bomb which ought to be the City’s spending priority”.
She highlighted that the eThekwini metro had lost more than half of its water supply due to leaks and water theft. The Auditor-General previously highlighted this, saying that the City lost 56% of its water supply in the last financial year.
“This year, the figure is expected to rise to close to 60% losses of water,” Phahla said.
She said wasteful expenditure was also a severe issue, and that it was more than hundreds of millions of rand “due to unfunded mandates, such as hostels, clinics, the expanded public works programme, and libraries, to name a few”.
“In the last financial year, ratepayers of eThekwini subsidised the expanded public works programme by an additional R200 million over and above the R60 million from taxes collected by the SA Revenue Service.”
Phahla said:
She claimed that hostels, where crime and poverty are high, cost the eThekwini municipality in the region of R400 million.
“This is ratepayers’ hard-earned money, which ought to be repurposed for pressing infrastructure and service delivery programmes but is, instead, spent to provide free services to employed people who hide behind the fact that they live in hostels to get away with not paying for services.”
In the last five years, the City spent R1.9 billion on sanitation in informal settlements where there is no evidence of sanitation assets because there are no adequate sanitation networks in place, Phahla said.
She also claimed that the eThekwini municipality’s roads and stormwater department employed expert engineers “who can execute this mandate of the City but choose not to”.
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“We hope that the new chair will enjoy their support and that this will translate to effective service delivery, including eradicating potholes in the City.”
She called on the committee’s new chairperson to investigate the awarding of several 36-month streetlight contracts in 2020 to contractors who have been paid more than R500 million, which News24 reported on.
“There is very little evidence of work completed as the street light infrastructure remains glaringly inadequate throughout the City, and yet these contractors remain on the municipality’s payroll.”
Phahla said Mavundla and the party collective in eThekwini “will be engaged in the court action in support of ActionSA and will continue to be the voice of the voiceless”.
News24 approached City spokesperson Msawakhe Mayisela for comment on the allegations.
Mayisela said the City was “very hard” at work to meet the needs of all its stakeholders.
“As a result, it has no time to respond to disinformation that seeks to ruin its image and distract it from its constitutional mandate.
“We are therefore appealing to our leaders, irrespective of their political persuasion, to accept political defeat and refrain from being irresponsible by fanning lies to keep their heads above water in the sphere of politics.”
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