City suffers due to repair backlog

NO matter which party you belong to or your personal political views, when it comes to water Nelson Mandela Bay’s cup is neither half full or half empty.

It is less than one third full.

With dam levels at a combined average of 32.37% the situation is dire.

Added to that, as The Herald reported yesterday, there appear to be too few plumbers to attend to the 6 400 water-related complaints still outstanding.

However, after years of not paying adequate attention to maintenance and infrastructure the metro is now caught between a rock and a hard place.

In theory, 10% of municipal capex should go to repairs and maintenance, but if this is continually used to pay to fix leaks which spring up here, there and everywhere, there is less money left to fix the root cause, which is old and failing infrastructure.

As Retief Odendaal, the metro’s political head of budget and treasury, noted in The Herald yesterday, “it is really sad because it highlights what happens when year after year the easiest place for anyone to cut back is on the refurbishment and maintenance”.

This seems to have been the case here.

It is commendable that the coalition government is channelling extra funds towards this area because under the previous administration, this was sorely lacking.

However, this is about more than broken pipes and water leaks.

What other basic services are teetering on the verge of disaster due to lack of funds for maintenance?

For example, getting rid of the bucket system, giving every community regular and efficient refuse removal, fixing street lights, enabling sufficient and safe electrical connections, and filling in potholes are other “must do” projects.

We have seen the anger of communities when service delivery is not good enough.

The city urgently needs to access funding before our dams run dry and we are faced with a catastrophe.