{"id":844530,"date":"2025-11-25T21:25:59","date_gmt":"2025-11-25T19:25:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/?p=844530"},"modified":"2025-11-25T21:31:05","modified_gmt":"2025-11-25T19:31:05","slug":"important-south-african-city-collapsing-in-front-of-everyones-eyes-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/government\/844530\/important-south-african-city-collapsing-in-front-of-everyones-eyes-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Important South African city collapsing in front of everyone’s eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nelson Mandela Bay, which is home to Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth, is collapsing with municipal chaos, out-of-control crime, and governance problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the view of Retief Odendaal, the Democratic Alliance\u2019s (DA\u2019s) mayoral candidate, who shared his views with Biznews\u2019 Chris Steyn<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Retief is a former mayor of Nelson Mandela Bay and stood at the head of a 10-party coalition that made massive strides in fixing the metro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said during his tenure as mayor, from September 2022 to May 2023, the DA and is coalition partners began to turn the metro around.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe improved service delivery and cracked down on corruption. Nelson Mandela Bay also achieved its first unqualified audit in 12 years,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, he said their work in Nelson Mandela Bay had been undone since his departure two and a half years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He told Steyn that Nelson Mandela Bay has had 12 mayors and 48 municipal managers since 2009. This instability creates tremendous chaos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Odendaal argues that this instability is aimed at facilitating corruption and looting, as one can loot from the state when there is absolute chaos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThat is what you get when you have a new boss in your institution every four months. There’s accountability to no one. Nobody is being held to account,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said that, as a consequence, Nelson Mandela Bay has experienced a progressive collapse of its institutions since 2009.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the last two decades, the city has accumulated around R28 billion in unauthorised, irregular, fruitless, and wasteful expenditure (UIFWE).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Odendaal said it has the highest ratio of irregular expenditure of any city on its annual financial statements. \u201cThat is the sad story of Nelson Mandela Bay,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The impact on service delivery in Nelson Mandela Bay<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Retief Odendaal, the Democratic Alliance\u2019s mayoral candidate<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Odendaal said Gqeberha has more than 10,000 streetlights that are not working and thousands of potholes that can’t be filled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere’s not even a tender in place to purchase tar to start eradicating our puddle backlog,\u201d he pointed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Residents and businesses experience frequent, localised power outages caused by tripping circuit breakers, substation issues, and attempted cable theft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There are also frequent water interruptions and low pressure, exacerbated mainly by infrastructure failures and historical drought conditions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There have been reports of sewage flowing onto beaches and in public parks due to inadequate maintenance of the wastewater treatment and sanitation infrastructure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The municipality is reportedly losing critical skills and senior engineering staff, which further hinders its service delivery and maintenance work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSeven of the ten executive director positions have been vacant for the past two years. So, there’s nobody to lead these departments,\u201d Odendaal said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe city manager has been suspended for two years, and she’s been earning R250,000 a month, and she hasn’t done anything to earn that money.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He stated that she is facing serious criminal charges and that the case is currently before the criminal court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe city has been unable to deal with the disciplinary process against it. That is the tale of Nelson Mandela Bay, and it has led to a collapse of services,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Serious crime problems in Gqeberha<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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The K9 unit in Gqeberha<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Odendaal said Nelson Mandela Bay, which used to be a relatively safe city, has seen an explosion of crime over the last couple of years.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSome of the police stations in Nelson Mandela Bay recorded the worst statistics for murder, rape and serious crime,” he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe have visited the Flying Squad in Nelson Mandela Bay, who’s got one vehicle to service a metro of about 1.4 million people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He said it was ridiculous that, even though there is manpower, there are not the vehicles needed to assist men and women in blue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another problem is that there is no proper CCTV camera system in place to address the high crime levels and assist with prosecutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe used to have a Joint Operation Centre with an extensive CCTV camera network that allowed SAPS to, in real time, see footage of crime happening,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAll of that has been vandalised, and more than R300 million worth of CCTV networks have been destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The city has previously introduced early warning technology, such as ShotSpotter, which provided real-time notifications to the police of where shots were fired.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe’ve just seen the city stop the subscription, thereby not continuing with it and leaving those communities vulnerable, and again, unable to support SAPS,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ian Cameron, a member of parliament and the DA\u2019s deputy spokesperson on Police, said that policing capacity<\/a> in Nelson Mandela Bay is in a dire state.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Flying Squad is on the brink of collapse, and the Anti-Gang and K9 Units are struggling to operate under extreme resource constraints,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Parliament has previously directed the SA Police Service to address the collapse of the Anti-Gang Unit and Crime Intelligence in Nelson Mandela Bay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, the latest information indicates that this directive did not lead to improved conditions for the police in the city.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photos of Nelson Mandela Bay collapse<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nelson Mandela Bay, which is home to Gqeberha, formerly known as Port Elizabeth, is collapsing with municipal chaos, out-of-control crime, and governance problems.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":844547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[21153,20678,7541,24257,24202],"class_list":["post-844530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-government","tag-gqeberha","tag-ian-cameron","tag-nelson-mandela-bay","tag-retief-odendaal","tag-sa-police-service-saps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=844530"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":844557,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/844530\/revisions\/844557"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/844547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=844530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=844530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/businesstech.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=844530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}