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.

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.

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.

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.