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The new leadership in eThekwini Municipality has not brought any changes. On the contrary, the city has been steadily sliding into a series of service delivery disasters.

The city is currently facing industrial action by employees of the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS), who embarked on a go-slow. Then there are budget constraints in the Parks Department with the grass cutting contract ending this month and no plans for a renewal.

While the city is currently crippled by these damaging service delivery failures, the Democratic Alliance (DA) in eThekwini has received information from reliable sources that the water department is unable to fix simple bursts for various reasons.

According to confidential sources reasons for this include that the city does not have money to pay any contractors, resulting in all contractors withdrawing their services this week. This means that in-house staff are now battling with backlogs in the hundreds in each region and are unable to get on with repairs as fittings, valves, pipes and crusher-run have been out of stock for months.

The stark reality is that technicians are merely isolating bursts and not repairing them. Besides, any burst that does get fixed, will likely have an issue again, as there is no river sand and crusher-run to back-fill correctly.

To add to this crisis, we are reliably informed that yesterday, the company from whom the city rents a portion of its fleet for water, also withdrew their services. This means that even the in-house officials and plumbers (technicians) are unable to carry out their jobs for lack of transportation.

EThekwini Water and Sanitation (EWS) has failed to fix the problems they experienced last year, namely ageing infrastructure, defective telemetry, ill-fitted tanks, broken pumps, upgrades for critical reservoirs and generators for affected pump stations.

The continuous failure to address the recurring problems is resulting in ratepayers being severely prejudiced for months on end. The Portfolio Committee Chairperson Thanduxolo Sabelo has failed dismally in his role to bring about change in the department.

Whilst ratepayers are being hit with increases tariffs and rising bills, they have lashed out at the city for failing to subsidize them with Jojo tanks and solar geysers, whilst non-ratepayers are receiving these benefits.

Nicole Graham, leader of the DA in eThekwini has written to the City Manager requesting an explanation. Together with Cllr Govender, they have called for an urgent meeting with city management to address the EWS crisis.

Issued by DA