Ordinarily, intervention by the national government in an ailing municipality ought to be applauded.
The problems in the Nelson Mandela Bay metro are many.
They’re not new, either. The municipality has had them for a while — more than 15 years.
Throughout this period there have been several interventions, each purporting to provide a remedy.
Instead of improving, the municipality has continued to deteriorate.
It’s no surprise, therefore, that people are asking if the latest intervention is a repeat of the previous shams.
The problems manifest in multiple ways.
It’s not uncommon for one to have a tyre burst on the M17 between Motherwell and Kwazakhele due to potholes.
And this is a main road, one of the busiest in the metro.
No-one is spared from crime, including abakhwetha (initiates).
Criminals have now taken to robbing amanqalatha — young boys to who take food and other items to initiation schools.
The complete darkness that shrouds large parts of the city at night instils even more fear. Functional street lights, or even traffic lights, are a rarity.
Then there’s litter that adorns fences and electricity lines as if it’s a decoration. It’s not a pretty sight.
The underlying cause of the Bay’s many problems is political.
The metro has had only two permanent city managers in the past 16 years, Lindiwe Msengana-Ndlela and Johann Mettler, and even they never finished their terms.
Msengana-Ndlela lasted about six months and Mettler no more than two years.
Politicians purposefully destabilised administrative leadership, from 2009, to have easy access to the resources of the municipality.
There has been a series of interim appointees to the office of the city manager.
Managerial instability weakens administration. Because they are appointed to serve in the interim, acting city managers don’t undertake any long-term planning.
Even worse, in Nelson Mandela Bay, some acting city managers became proxies of politicians, allegedly channelling tenders in their direction.
Almost all the acting city bosses were seconded from the provincial government in Bhisho.
Elias Ntoba, the first acting city manager after Graham Richards’ forced resignation in 2009, stayed in the position for more than two years.
Ntoba was the favourite of the politicians at the ANC’s regional office.
Nondumiso Maphazi, who was then mayor, complained that Ntoba had no time for her. He was taking instructions from the ANC’s regional office.
Local politicians were supported by the national government.
The minister responsible for local government at the time, Sicelo Shiceka, turned a blind-eye to the metro’s repeated violation of the 90-days acting period.
Ntoba felt so comfortable in the acting role that he felt it was his, permanently.
When the new mayor, Zanoxolo Wayile, terminated his contract because he was planning to get a permanent appointee, Ntoba refused to vacate the office. He had to be locked out.
But the party leaders at the regional office wouldn’t allow Wayile and the council to choose their own candidate.
They preferred someone else. Wayile never managed to make the permanent appointment September 2011.
Ntoba’s tenure marked the beginning of the decay.
The metro made headlines with one scandal after another.
First it was the Kabuso audit report, then it was the looting of the funds intended to build an integrated public transportation system (IPTS).
ANC regional party leaders booted out Wayile from the mayoralty for his insistence on pressing charges against comrades accused of corruption in the Kabuso report.
They then brought in Ben Fihla, who was too old (about 81) to be effective. Fihla was a token.
Party leaders Chippa Ngcolomba and Zandisile Qupe ran City Hall.
Municipal resources, especially IPTS funds, were looted at the expense of public transportation.
Because their priority was self-aggrandisement, the new buses were never put on the road, despite the huge amounts of money spent to purchase them. They were never fully prepared to be operational.
Local businesses suffered extensive losses during the reconfiguration of roads, supposedly for the new buses that never came.
Today, Ngcolomba and Qupe, together with businessmen and municipal officials, face charges of theft and fraud.
The officials allegedly colluded with the politicians and businessmen to manipulate tender processes.
Public transportation hasn’t been the only casualty of the political debauchery.
The persistent filth that stains the public space is a result of deliberate neglect of the municipality’s own trucks so that it can hire private service providers.
It’s sabotage, to secure kickbacks.
Homes have been destroyed and lives lost due to floods because stormwater drains are not cleaned.
The last time the council purported to have them cleaned, in 2018, it turned out to be a scam to siphon off R21m.
ANC councillors, together with the mayor at the time, Mongameli Bobani of the United Democratic Movement, allegedly colluded with criminals to defraud the municipality.
The criminals later killed each other over the loot. The politicians were never held responsible.
Floods, meanwhile, continue to wreak havoc.
Then there are the funds that are returned to the fiscus because the administration — still without a permanent city manager and only one permanent executive director, instead of 10 — is too unstable to see through service delivery projects.
There’s no reason to believe that Velenkosi Hlabisa is another Sicelo Shiceka.
Nor is there evidence showing that he’s a proxy for Bisho to facilitate the siphoning off of resources for the benefit of the party.
History does tell us, though, that this intervention may just be a farce.
Local politicians have shown an extraordinary determination to run the metro into the ground.
If this intervention is not accompanied with powers to restrain their destructive instincts, then it has no prospects of succeeding.
Mcebisi Ndletyana is professor of political studies at the University of Johannesburg
The Herald