The anatomy of a failed municipality
Msunduzi faces a unique conundrum ‘where the problem is known, the answer is known, yet it seems the problem cannot get solved’
We are still in the midst of the Covid19 shockwaves, but one ailment for which it seems there is no vaccine is the parlous state of local government.
Many municipalities cannot deliver basic services. Audit results decline without any consequence management, and the number of municipalities in distress, which are being propped up by provincial interventions, has been steadily increasing.
The department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs has had to support or take over the executive functions of failing local municipalities. The department has released many from administration but with ongoing support. These municipalities are defined as “fragile”. But others are recidivists; they are no longer failing, they have failed.
One of these is the Msunduzi local municipality in the capital of Kwazulu-natal — Pietermaritzburg. A city of decay, filth, potholes, electricity outages that last for up to five days and water outages even longer. No money, no spare parts. A city whose city hall displays a clock stuck at 11.45 because they have not paid the only horologist who can maintain it.
Every month the city recovers less in rates and service charges than it spends. When it receives conditional grant funding for capital projects, it frequently fails to spend it because of an inability to establish contracts and oversee the work. The city is scrambling to raise funds for major electricity upgrades, while entering into a service level agreement with Eskom to maintain what is left of its ailing infrastructure. The city is under administration for the second time in 10 years, this time for 27 months.
In March 2010 Msunduzi crashed. The mayor, Zanele Hlatshwayo, accused municipal manager Rob Haswell of bringing the city to its knees with a rampant budget deficit. Hlatshwayo was recalled, the executive committee was reshuffled and Haswell resigned. There was financial and institutional collapse.
Johan Mettler was the head of the provincial intervention team appointed by the department just two months earlier to formulate a turnaround strategy. According to local media, they were not making headway because “officials refused to cooperate with the team”.
The collapse of the city’s administration gave the provincial intervention team the mandate it needed, in the form of a section 139(1)(b) administration order, to implement a turnaround strategy without encumbrance. Mettler ruled the administration with a fist of iron, for the good.
Mettler was to present a progress report on the intervention team’s strategy to a city-wide stakeholder gathering in January 2011. Before the event took place he disappeared to the quieter pastures of the Drakenstein local municipality. His deputy, Ben Dorfling, presented an analysis showing few strengths and opportunities, but many institutional weaknesses and 76 threats.
Sibusiso Sithole arrived as administrator number two to finish the job and hand over the reins to a new municipal council, with the words, “Now don’t mess it up”. The municipality showed signs of recovery. By 2014, incoming municipal manager Mxolisi Nkosi brought the city its first clean audit in years, and in 2015 he won the department’s award for best performing municipal manager.
But as the ANC leadership contest played out between the Jacob Zuma and Cyril Ramaphosa camps, the political and administrative leadership fissured, with mayor Chris Ndlela and Nkosi backing the CR17 campaign and deputy municipal manager Ray Ngcobo and deputy mayor Thobani Zuma the Nkosazana Dlamini-zuma faction.
Then Ndlela was recalled and Nkosi was suspended by his own two deputies. A raft of senior officials followed suit, including the manager in the city manager’s office, the head of technical services, the head of internal audit … 19 people in all. In August 2016, Ndlela released a report on his last 100 days in office under the headline: “Trust no one, fear all”.
A businessman with no political experience, Themba Njilo, was brought in as caretaker mayor while the feuding continued.
Over the ensuing years, things became so bad that in April 2018, ANC members from the Moses Mabhida region marched on the provincial legislature demanding that the ANC national executive committee dissolve the regional executive. The targets of their wrath were provincial secretary Super Zuma, regional secretary Mzi Zuma, regional chair Mthandeni Dlungwane and MEC Nomusa Dubencube. The core of the rot was the Msunduzi municipality.
It was forewarned when the auditor general presented an adverse audit opinion on 28 February 2019, after an audit disclaimer the prior year, and told councillors that the city was “on the brink of collapse”.
In April 2019, Msunduzi was placed under section 139(1)(b) administration for the second time. Dubencube set out the reasons to a full council meeting: the collapse of service delivery; looming bankruptcy; the filthy state of the city; councillors not attending council meetings; failure to act against managers involved in irregular expenditure; and underspending of conditional grants intended for development and the upgrading of the city’s aging infrastructure.
Sibusiso Sithole, who completed the first period of provincial administration, returned to his old job. Mayor Njilo was replaced by Mzi Thebolla in August 2019. The post of municipal manager, which had been vacant since Sizwe Hadebe was suspended in 2018, was filled by Kadoda Mathide in April 2020 — just as the hard Covid-19 lockdown struck.
Two months into his tenure as administrator Sithole was quoted in local media as saying: “Msunduzi is worse than before — the politics are worse”. He said Msunduzi had been “captured”, that councillors were intimately linked to companies that had been looting the city’s coffers and that he had received death threats. Following the path of his 2011 predecessor, Mettler, Sithole disappeared on 19 February 2020 to the Ugu district municipality, and was replaced by the department’s Scelo Duma.
When the rot is so deep, and surgery has failed, one cannot hide a botched job with a dressing.
In October and December 2020 large parts of the city had power outages for up to five days at a time, as a result of ageing sub-stations going up in flames — caused by inexperienced staff who often had to use the wrong parts because of stock shortages.
In June this year the high court in Pietermaritzburg found the Msunduzi municipality guilty on multiple counts of contravention of section 24 of the constitution for chronic mismanagement of the landfill site. It has belched toxic black smoke across the city in one instance in January 2019 for four days.
Duma appears to have given up. In December 2020, he published his progress report, Dust Unsettled, which said the reason for service delivery failure was a culture of entitlement and impunity; political interference; the use of state resources for personal gain, and maladministration, fraud and corruption. He concluded: “Msunduzi faces a unique conundrum where the problem is known, the answer is known, yet it seems the problem cannot get solved.”
A recent internal audit identified R64-million of losses through fraud over 30 months.
The patience of business is exhausted. Dialogue has failed. Residents are at boiling point over the collapse of service delivery, the theft of water and electricity, and hard electricity disconnections and legal action against defaulters.
Only 35% of customers are targeted for payment. Billing disputes run into the thousands as a result of faulty SAP accounting software that cost more than R250-million.
There is light at the end of the tunnel. Residents are fed up with the looting of their money by greedy politicians and their cohorts. The “gatvol” factor is causing citizens to rise into action. Ratepayers in Wembley have sent the municipality a letter of demand for the costs of road maintenance (pothole repairs) they have incurred. Residents in Imbali Unit 13 are seeking legal redress for the flooding of their houses caused by poor road design and maintenance.
This has given form to a city-wide platform, the Msunduzi Association of Residents’, Ratepayers’ and Civic Associations (MARRC), with affiliates from the suburbs to the old R293 townships. People are so disenchanted with the conventional body politic that there is talk of independent civic and ratepayers’ candidates standing in the local government elections, now likely to be deferred until February 2022.
The MARRC has petitioned the MEC for the department to place the Msunduzi municipality under section 139(1)(c) administration — in other words, dissolve the council. That will remove the political protection afforded to corrupt councillors and officials.
Then one can start weeding out the other root causes of systemic collapse. Focus on raising income, without which it is impossible to deliver services. And take the hard line adopted by the former administrator, Mettler, when he first arrived in Msunduzi: “Sorry, I am too busy arresting people to talk to the media.”