The South African Federation of Trade Unions (SAFTU) in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro reiterates and deepens its previous public statement on the ongoing municipal bungling, administrative collapse, and governance failures in the Metro. While these failures are real and damaging, we maintain that they are symptoms of a deeper, structural crisis in the way local government is funded, organised, and politically constrained.
The real debate we should be having is about the municipal funding model, the austerity policies imposed by the national government, and the commodification of basic services.
Municipalities receive approximately 10% of the national budget, yet they are constitutionally mandated to deliver essential services, including water, electricity, sanitation, and housing. At the same time, they are expected to generate their own revenue by selling these basic services to residents.
In a society like South Africa, marked by mass unemployment, deep inequality, and a largely working-class population, this model is structurally unjust and unsustainable. What we are witnessing in Nelson Mandela Bay and across the country is nothing less than service delivery apartheid.
Because of South Africa’s history of apartheid spatial planning and racially segregated development, wealthier, historically white suburban areas are better serviced, better maintained, and prioritised, while working-class and historically black townships are subjected to neglect, interruptions, debt collection, and criminalisation.
Poor households are forced to repeatedly “prove” their poverty to qualify for so-called indigent policies and ATTPs. This process is humiliating, exclusionary, and degrading. This is not service delivery; it is institutionalised punishment for poverty.
Service delivery apartheid reproduces the logic of apartheid geography:
– those who can pay receive reliable services,
– those who cannot are excluded, disconnected, or disciplined.
At the heart of this crisis is a funding model that treats residents as customers and municipalities as corporations, rather than recognising people as citizens with constitutional rights.
This crisis is exacerbated by the austerity policies imposed by the national government. Instead of strengthening local government, austerity systematically starves municipalities of resources, forcing them into budget cuts, privatisation, outsourcing, and aggressive cost-recovery measures that punish working-class communities. Much public commentary focuses narrowly on political instability and factional battles. While these exist, they do not explain the scale or persistence of the crisis.
The deeper issue is administrative and institutional capacity, constrained by the rigid and punitive framework of the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA). The MFMA forces municipalities to operate like private corporations, prioritising balance sheets over human need and financial compliance over constitutional obligations. It is a straitjacket that prevents municipalities from governing in the interests of the people.
Another critical but often ignored issue is corporate extractivism. Large corporations operating in our cities consume vast amounts of water and electricity to generate private profits. Households, meanwhile, use these same services for basic survival, cooking, cleaning, bathing, and lighting their homes.
Why should working-class households be forced to pay for basic life, while corporations exploit public infrastructure to maximise profit?
SAFTU PE Local is clear:
– Those who use public services for profit must pay the highest tariffs.
– The working class and the unemployed must be guaranteed universally free basic services, without humiliating means tests or bureaucratic barriers.
Anything less entrenches inequality, deepens service delivery apartheid and accelerates municipal collapse.
The ANC, the Democratic Alliance, and many commentators continue to miss the point. They focus on corruption scandals, personalities, and political infighting. These are real problems, but they are not the root cause.
The municipal crisis is structural.
The solution lies in rejecting austerity, fundamentally restructuring municipal finance, and decommodifying basic services. This is not a utopian demand. It is the minimum requirement for municipalities to fulfil their constitutional mandate and restore dignity to the lives of working-class people.
SAFTU has been campaigning, organising, and warning about this crisis for years. Our interventions have been ignored, dismissed, and sidelined, yet the crisis deepens.
Until the government confronts the municipal finance model head-on, municipalities like Nelson Mandela Bay will remain trapped in permanent crisis. The debate we need is not about personalities. It is a debate about justice, dignity, and the radical transformation of local government.
Issued by:
SAFTU Nelson Mandela Bay Local
Local Secretary
Mziyanda Macanda
069 560 4002
