05.12.2025
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CoGTA appoints task team to strengthen governance in Mandela Bay

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  • The Executive Mayor of Nelson Mandela bay Municipality ,Cllr Babalwa Lobishe

The Department of Cooperative Governance (CoGTA) has appointed a 10-person multidisciplinary task team to be deployed in the Nelson Mandela Bay Metro, Eastern Cape, to strengthen governance, fix failing systems, and help restore basic service delivery. 

The intervention comes as the National Treasury has threatened to withhold R546 million in equitable share funding, unless the municipality acts on more than R30 billion in historic unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.  

CoGTA says the ten-member task team, appointed under Section 154 of the Constitution, includes specialists in financial management, internal audit, and engineering experts to tackle failing infrastructure.

The team will operate full-time inside the metro, supported by a dedicated project office, without using municipal funds. The Deputy Minister, Dr Dickson Masemola, says the aim of the intervention is to fast-track service delivery.

“We have agreed that it is important to put to practice section 154 of the constitution within the spirit of corporation Governance and to make sure that as spheres that are interverted into the dependant, we support one another, because at the end of the day it is about services to the people of South Africa, therefore in particular the residents of this Metro.”

The experts will work on detailed quarterly milestones, and due to the urgency of the situation, must deliver two progress reports between now and March.

Cogta MEC Zolile Williams says the task team’s first priority will be stabilising governance and preventing the city from losing any more critical funds.

“There’s a big irregular expenditure part of the job of intervening is to improve cooperative Governance and clear irregular expenditure, and also prevent the haemorrhaging of funds back to national treasury. I think what has been lost so far is close to a billion. We want to stop that and we have now enforced them through our own mechanism that they must join the risk-adjusted strategy and implement it to prevent the loss of resources again back to national fiscus.”

The municipality formally requested the intervention after years of worsening challenges. Nelson Mandela Bay Executive Mayor Babalwa Lobishe says the challenges include financial mismanagement, leadership instability, shortages of critical technical skills, and crumbling infrastructure across water, sanitation, roads and electricity networks.

“We are mindful of the fact that we should be a state that is running its affairs independently, but we have made the call because we want to build capacity so that we are able to stand on our own in future and we are delighted about the areas that we have discussed. Moving forward, we should be turning things around and, in particular, in finance, our grant spending and also dealing with financial statements that are constantly a challenge to us.”

CoGTA says if Nelson Mandela Bay fails to co-operate or demonstrate progress, the metro could face the far more aggressive Section 139 intervention, in which provincial and national government take over administration of the municipality.

 

 

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