Business organisation Sakeliga wants national government to take over the province’s collapsed Ditsobotla Local Municipality. The case has much wider implications for local government in SA.
Ditsobotla, about three hours west of Joburg, achieved fleeting national fame in 2021 when Clover announced it was pulling its cheese factory out of the area due to what it politely called “poor service delivery”. It has since relocated to Queensburgh in Durban, despite threats of protest from trade unions and supplications from the North West provincial government.
“The [Clover] Lichtenburg factory has been experiencing water and power outages for years, and the municipality has not maintained the surrounding infrastructure,” the company said. “Despite numerous efforts to engage the municipality on these matters, the issues have not been resolved.”
Ditsobotla again achieved notoriety in 2022 when President Cyril Ramaphosa described it as a “horror show” that had been taken over by gangsterism. He was there on the election trail facing angry residents, whom he implored to return the ANC to power – only this time with better councillors. In the 2021 local elections, the ANC won a 50% majority with the DA and EFF winning about 14% each of the vote.
We know from the Auditor-General that the worst municipalities in SA are splattered across the Northern Cape, North West and Free State.
These municipalities have the same telltale signs of looting and neglect: electricity if you’re lucky, Eskom bills unpaid, taps running dry, poor water quality, and refuse collection a faint memory of a sunnier past.
That pretty much sums up the state of Ditsobotla, which comprises Lichtenburg, Coligny, and Ga-Raphalane, home to over 200 000 residents. It failed to submit financial statements for the 2023 financial year and has been repeatedly flagged by the Auditor-General for financial mismanagement, audit failures and collapsing basic services.
ALSO READ: North West residents still waiting for basic services after years of begging the government
Enough
This collapse of services and governance prompted business organisation Sakeliga to ask the North West High Court to declare national government responsible for the decay at Ditsobotla and assume responsibility for it, as required under Section 139 of the Constitution.
This is not the first time the municipality has been bypassed.
In 2023, North West province took over and drafted a recovery plan, but even that hasn’t worked, says Sakeliga. More than a year has passed since the recovery plan was formulated, and it still hasn’t been adopted. That plan called for a six-year implementation, which is “unreasonable and unjustifiable” and ignores the urgency of the situation.
How bad is bad?
The court papers detail the extent of the crisis at Ditsobotla:
- No municipal manager or senior managers;
- Understaffed internal audit function;
- Kidnapping of provincial staff from the province by municipal employees due to non-payment of salaries;
- An under-funded budget with no prospect of improvement;
- Not enough funds to publish a recruitment advertisement for a municipal manager, prompting it to approach the province for the funds;
- Unpaid contractors holding the municipality to ransom over unpaid invoices;
- Electricity infrastructure obsolete;
- Roads are in a dire state, with insufficient staff and funds to maintain them; and
- Criminals have vandalised or sabotaged water and electricity infrastructure.
One of the reasons given by the province for non-implementation of the recovery plan is the frequent vandalism and theft of water and electrical infrastructure, leading to extended service outages in parts of Lichtenburg, Coligny and Blydeville.
There’s also a lack of skills, employees refusing to work, and a lack of funds to purchase needed equipment and pay salaries.
ALSO READ: North West municipality’s years-old water woes blamed on blackouts
Worse than just bad …
Reading through the court papers, it doesn’t get much better.
The provincial managers sent in to clean up the mess noticed a pattern of possible organised crime and sabotage. This became evident when certain outside service providers were found to be receiving huge unauthorised and fruitless expenditure payments. These outside contractors were appointed on an emergency basis due to theft, overcharged for their services, and demanded upfront payment.
This has apparently become a ‘thing’ in SA – destroy municipal infrastructure so you can outsource services to your buddies and gouge local residents.
Various reports identifying the state of Ditsobotla have been prepared by North West province, the latest showing woeful under-achievement in virtually all key activities. Of the 95 key activities to be implemented in the finance pillar, just 21% have been achieved or partly achieved in 15 months.
It gets worse from there – only 4% of key activities have been achieved in the institutional and human resources pillar, 15% in governance, and 1% in service delivery, a situation that remains almost unchanged in more than a year.
Most residents in the area live below the poverty line, so recovering funds through service fees makes it almost impossible to invest in infrastructure.
Illegal electrical connections are on the rise, and civil unrest has accompanied water shortages on several occasions.
Despite a 2023 order from the North West High Court to supply sufficient potable water to residents as a matter of urgency, this has not happened.
One attempt to address the water issue involved the delivery of water tankers, which were to have been connected to the water mains. This never happened. The site has since been vandalised and is standing idle.
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Worrying trend of de-urbanisation
What’s happening at Disobotla is part of a worrying trend of de-urbanisation, says Sakeliga.
“Across South Africa, cities and towns are met with an influx of people from the rural areas generally attracted to economic opportunities and the provision of greater and/or better basic services, such as water, electricity and health care, due to the centralisation of services in urban areas.”
Yet the opposite is happening in the Ngaka Modiri Molema District Municipality, which Ditsobotla is part of.
Sakeliga says this due to the collapse of Ditsobotla and its local economy.
In other words, people are leaving the town for rural areas.
Attempts to appoint a new municipal manager in July 2024 ended up in the Labour Court after the acting manager applied to have the appointment set aside. This created further delays in addressing the municipality’s well-documented crises.
The Klipveld Water Supply Scheme, which supplies three local towns, has 17 boreholes – but only 15 are operational. The boreholes can supply 15 million litres of water a day, well below the 20-million-litres-a-day demand. The situation is worsened by vandalism and illegal water connections.
Residents of Boikhutso, a village in Ventersdorp, spend hours each day queuing for water, which unscrupulous members of the community have seized for their own profit.
“Waste and refuse removal [have] ceased since 4 March 2024, with the accumulation of waste across Ditsobotla posing a serious hygiene and health risk to residents,” says Sakeliga’s court papers.
ALSO READ: High court orders North West government to resolve crisis-plagued Ditsobotla
Illegal waste dumps have proliferated, and raw sewage flows through several large streets.
Municipal billing has either collapsed – or, where it does occur, is based on estimates. This resulted in unlawful intimidation by municipal staff to coerce payment for inaccurate or disputed bills.
Roads and signage have deteriorated.
Yet the municipal manager set aside R180 000 to send a team to Bloemfontein for a sports event, illustrating the municipality’s completely skewed priorities.
In 2024, Eskom said it was owed R1.2 billion by Ditsobotla. Lichtenburg residents report that water is available for two or three hours a day, and those who can afford it pay for private refuse removal.
Clover may have been the first large business to vacate the area, but it won’t be the last.
ALSO READ: Ditsobotla municipality: ‘A humanitarian, constitutional crisis’ – Sakeliga
The provincial executive has failed to restore basic services to Ditsobotla and it’s time for national government to step in and restore order, says Sakeliga.
Instead of acting to avert a deepening crisis, the government chose inaction.
The outcome of this case could be a watershed for the country’s accelerating descent into municipal chaos.
While the courts have on occasion sided with residents and businesses against failing municipalities, these have also been reversed (as in the case of Kgetlengrivier, also in North West). The view from Sakeliga is that the situation is now so dire that the courts, and national government, can no longer look the other way.
This article was republished from Moneyweb. Read the original here.
