It was bitterly cold on Wednesday night at a guesthouse in well-to-do Heuwelsig, Mangaung, as the area’s electricity went out.
It wasn’t load-shedding but one of many outages staff say have blown most plug points in the establishment’s rooms and had them struggling to heat guests’ meals.
Earlier that day, sewage was trickling past the apparently deserted municipal headquarters in Bloemfontein, which the inner-city homeless call the Glas Paleis (Glass Palace). Sewage also flows past the nearby Supreme Court of Appeal, perhaps a metaphor for the state of SA’s judicial capital.
Mangaung racked up R1.6bn in irregular expenditure and R1.17bn in unauthorised expenditure in 2019/2020, according to the auditor-general’s report released this week.
The metro, the site of recent violent service delivery protests and which has obtained qualified audits since 2016, failed to submit its financials on time this year.
Its former mayor, Olly Mlamleli, is a co-accused in the multimillion-rand Free State asbestos tender case with another Mangaung resident, suspended ANC secretary-general Ace Magashule.
Auditor-general Tsakani Maluleke said this week: “Mangaung was late but it eventually got an unqualified audit, which is an improvement from last year, but there are significant supply chain management issues.”
DA councillor David McKay said: “Basically, the metro has collapsed. Sewage flows like lava down the street. We’ve had one water leak for three years now, and now the municipality owes Bloem Water over R1bn.”
Mangaung has been under administration for a year, with little to show for it. “We’ve got an acting-acting mayor,” said McKay. “The actual acting mayor is off sick. Our city manager is on suspension with full pay and is under investigation for maladministration and corruption, so we have an acting manager.”
Wewe Norris, a resident of Ashbury township, said: “We have potholes on nearly every street because the drainage system is blocked when it rains. Where I live is close to the [sewage] treatment plant. The pipes are not designed for the population so there are always blockages.
“We haven’t had an issue with our lights but water is a big problem. The taps will be dry for days and when they do work, mud comes out.”
Mangaung metro spokesperson Qondile Khedama said the municipality needed hundreds of millions of rands to fix its infrastructure, including R58m a year for water, R224m to address sewer maintenance backlogs and R300m a year for the next 10 years to fix the roads. That’s aside from what it will cost to maintain what is fixed.
He said the biggest challenges include aging infrastructure, increasing bad debt because of rising unemployment and low economic growth, and loss of revenue because of the lockdown. “There are high levels of water and electricity losses due to aging infrastructure, illegal connections and tampering with meters,” he said.
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