DELAYED ACCOUNTABILITY: Red tape stalls Nelson Mandela Bay’s R30bn irregular spending inquiry

Three oversight meetings into Nelson Mandela Bay’s approximately R30-billion irregular expenditure were cancelled after senior managers failed to submit mandatory financial reports, prompting public accounts committee chairperson Luxolo Namette to prepare a motion to council.

Nelson Mandela Bay has one of the highest irregular expenditure records of any municipality in South Africa – yet this year, not a single meeting has been held to investigate it.

Instead, three meetings were cancelled because senior managers did not submit eight outstanding reports required under Section 32 of the Municipal Finance Management Act – the legal mechanism that compels officials to account for irregular spending.

The City’s Municipal Public Accounts Committee has not interrogated a single irregular expenditure report since December 2025, despite warnings from the National Treasury that continued failures could jeopardise portions of its grant funding.

The metro had been instructed to hold two meetings per month to deal with the irregular expenditure while strengthening its financial controls by curbing evergreen contracts and deviations, among other measures.

Now, Municipal Public Accounts Committee chairperson Luxolo Namette is preparing a motion to council to address the missed meetings and delays in submitting reports.

The most recent meeting, scheduled for Tuesday 2 June, was cancelled at the last minute because the reports had still not been submitted.

Namette wrote to councillors informing them about the failed meetings due to the delayed submission of reports. He reminded councillors that at a 9 December 2025 Municipal Public Accounts Committee meeting, former acting city manager Lonwabo Ngoqo committed to ensuring the reports were submitted to his office for compliance checks before being sent to the secretariat for distribution.

“The office waited in vain, with the secretariat reporting that there were no reports that had been referred to their office from the city manager’s office, as per the resolution.

“An email was written to the city manager, early in April 2026, alerting him that the meeting of 7 April was unlikely to sit due to no reports [being] submitted to the secretariat, seeking clarity on the cause of the delay. There was no response to this email.”

Namette indicated that after establishing from the secretariat that no reports had been submitted by 9 April, his office wrote to the city manager’s office for an explanation.

“On 26 May another email was written to the city manager registering the frustration they are putting the office under