MUNICIPAL PARALYSIS: Nelson Mandela Bay needs 101 remedies, but will anyone implement them?

Resistance from within Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality is hampering efforts to implement 101 urgent corrective measures identified by an intervention team, raising fresh concerns about the metro’s ability to recover from years of governance failures.

Government leaders have warned that resistance from within Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s administration is slowing the implementation of a wide-ranging intervention programme aimed at stabilising the troubled metro.

The warning follows a high-level intervention meeting in Gqeberha on Wednesday, 10 June 2026, where Eastern Cape Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) MEC Zolile Williams and Deputy Minister of Cogta Dr Dickson Masemola met the municipality’s Section 154 intervention team, executive Mayor Babalwa Lobishe and members of her mayoral committee.

At the centre of the government’s concerns is the slow implementation of 101 urgent corrective measures identified by an intervention team deployed to the metro in December.

Williams said progress had been hampered by resistance from officials within municipal departments and the continued absence of a permanent city manager, which he said was undermining efforts to drive reforms.

“As it is currently, there’s no stability in this municipality. 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 have placed here, and we feel that it requires a properly appointed city manager to drive those processes,” Williams said.

The MEC said irregular and wasteful expenditure had increased sharply over the past two years, rising from R21-billion to about R31-billion, which he described as unacceptable.

“If you remember, it was R21-billion. Now it has increased to about R31-billion, and it’s unacceptable,” he said. “One of the issues I can tell you is that if the City can accumulate irregular expenditure close to R8-billion 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,” Williams added.

He said the intervention team had attempted to break down the irregular and wasteful expenditure figures and identify corrective actions, but municipal management had failed to implement its recommendations.

“Our team here has raised about 101 issues that need to be attended to immediately, but there’s slow progress in implementation which is why you need a city manager, as in yesterday,” Williams said.

Attention has also turned to the unresolved susp