EFF’s Thambo promises 5-year plan to rebuild ‘collapsing’ Nelson Mandela Bay

EFF Nelson Mandela Bay mayoral candidate Sinawo Thambo says an EFF-led administration would spend its first five years laying the foundations for a long-term turnaround of the metro, starting with the rehabilitation of its collapsing electricity, water, roads and public recreational infrastructure.

Thambo acknowledged that the scale of Nelson Mandela Bay’s problems means the city cannot be completely transformed within one term, but said an ambitious programme with measurable targets could put the metro on a different trajectory within five years.

“It’s impossible for anyone to say that you can turn around the current crisis confronting Nelson Mandela Bay in five years,” he said.

“But there are boxes you can tick on the way towards a turnaround.”

At the centre of his plan is a major infrastructure rehabilitation programme, coupled with a restructuring of the municipality’s administration and an aggressive drive to tackle corruption.

Thambo said electricity and water infrastructure would be among the immediate priorities, arguing that unreliable services were undermining both households and businesses and preventing Nelson Mandela Bay from realising its potential as a manufacturing and investment hub.

He said the municipality needed to stop responding to infrastructure failures one incident at a time and instead conduct a comprehensive assessment of the city’s ageing infrastructure to determine what needed to be rebuilt and maintained.

“We need to rebuild the pipes. Where are the challenges? Instead of us reacting to a leakage one by one, let’s look at the infrastructure of the entire city,” he said.

Thambo said the municipality would also need to develop its own engineering capacity so that critical infrastructure could be maintained internally rather than relying heavily on external contractors.

That forms part of his broader plan to insource municipal services.

An EFF administration, he said, would seek to bring functions such as security, cleaning, road maintenance, accounting and engineering into the municipality, arguing that outsourcing had created opportunities for inflated costs, tender manipulation and corruption.

“We need to internalise the functions of road maintenance,” he said, arguing that permanent municipal teams could respond more quickly to infrastructure problems while building technical expertise within the city.

You can’t want to have an industrial hub where roads are effectively a pothole. There’s more holes than roads.

—  Sinawo Thambo

Thambo’s turnaround plan extends beyond basic service delivery.

He wants Nelson Mandela Bay to reclaim its identity as a manufacturing and industrial centre by strengthening existing industries around the port, automotive manufacturing and fishing.

But he said investment would not come while businesses were forced to contend with unreliable electricity, water shortages and roads filled with potholes.

“You can’t want to have an industrial hub where roads are effectively a pothole. There’s more holes than roads,” he said.

The EFF candidate also wants to use municipal functions and training programmes to tackle youth unemployment.

He proposed expanding artisan and technical training and creating pathways for young people into manufacturing, the fishing industry and port-related businesses.

He said the city needed to move away from focusing exclusively on academic qualifications and develop practical skills that could support its industrial economy.

Sports and arts would also form part of the proposed turnaround.

Thambo said neglected stadiums and recreational facilities had become increasingly associated with dumping and criminal activity rather than sport.

He wants the municipality to rehabilitate stadiums and rebuild local sports leagues, particularly in rugby, cricket and football, while creating pathways between community clubs and professional sport.

He also wants investment in music and arts facilities, including township-based spaces for recording, musical training and performance.

For Thambo, rebuilding the city is ultimately about creating a place where young people can see a future without having to leave for Johannesburg or Cape Town.

He described the exodus of skilled professionals as a “brain drain” and said he had returned to Nelson Mandela Bay partly because he believed professionals who had left needed to reinvest their skills in the city.

“We have come back because we have seen that there is a brain drain. There’s a professional drain in the city,” he said.

He wants the metro to develop a stronger corporate identity, with new commercial, tourism and residential developments creating opportunities for graduates and professionals.

“There’s no need for a person who wants to be an accountant to move to Sandton. There’s no need for a person who wants to be an engineer to move to the Western Cape,” he said.

However, Thambo said the proposed turnaround would require more than municipal intervention.

He argued that national government would have to work with the metro to address the structural financial challenges facing municipalities, while the city would need a funding model that protected poor households from bearing the cost of infrastructure failures.

He also called for greater accountability from large businesses, saying major consumers of municipal water and electricity should pay their rates and contribute proportionately to maintaining the infrastructure they rely on.

At the same time, he said poor households, particularly those dependent on social grants, should not be treated in the same way as large commercial consumers.

Thambo’s plan is also explicitly political.

He said the EFF has identified new pockets of electoral support in Nelson Mandela Bay and expects its performance in some areas to surprise its opponents.

But if the party does not win an outright majority, coalition politics will determine whether it can implement its programme.

While the EFF has ruled out governing with the DA and Freedom Front Plus, Thambo said other coalition possibilities would be assessed after the election results were known.

The overriding consideration would be whether an arrangement could improve service delivery and serve the interests of residents.

Thambo also dismissed the prospect of the ANC returning to power as the answer to Nelson Mandela Bay’s problems, arguing that the party had governed the metro for most of the democratic era and therefore bore significant responsibility for its decline.