In 2015/16, the Kouga Local Municipality (Jeffrey’s Bay, Humansdorp, Patensie, Hankey, St Francis, Loerie) was the second worst-run municipality in the Eastern Cape. It was factually bankrupt, receiving one qualified audit opinion after the other. Only 5% of its municipal fleet was operational, and its infrastructure was crumbling due to a lack of maintenance.

The legendary but sadly late Elza van Lingen, a DA MP at the time, was determined to bring change to Kouga and win an outright DA majority as our Mayoral Candidate.
Elza was determined to win the election, and notwithstanding some serious health issues, her determination and grit saw the DA win the election with an outright majority. Within months, she and the rest of the DA team set a plan in place to turn this municipality around.

The Kouga Story

Key to this plan was that the DA had to ensure that they rooted out corruption, appointed suitably qualified officials, repaid its unaffordable debt, got value for money, and generally ensured the adherence to good governance principles.
Instead of purchasing a new fleet, they started to fix vehicles in their fleet where it was economically viable. Fiscal prudence saw Kouga repay most of its debt within 2 years. Given that there was no political meddling by politicians, the administration stabilised, and progress was made with service delivery. The municipality started to excel in housing delivery to the poor, much so that funding from other municipalities was redirected to Kouga because they could deliver.
By 2021, after 5 years of DA governance, Kouga was crowned the best-run municipality in the Eastern Cape! Certainly not perfect, but a far cry from the other ailing and failing municipalities in the Eastern Cape.

Unfortunately, between 2016 and 2022, the prolonged drought was a significant risk factor for the municipality. There was a real possibility that Kouga would have run out of water, and as such, the Council was forced to invest almost all of its available capital funding for new infrastructure in drought mitigation and/or water augmentation projects. At the time, the Department of Water and Sanitation praised Kouga as a prudent example of how a Council that takes difficult political decisions can avert an imminent disaster.

Collapsing Road Infrastructure

One of the areas where Kouga Municipality received major criticism from the public was that its road infrastructure was collapsing. Given that most of its capital was invested in water infrastructure, as said above, sadly, there was very little funding available for investment in road refurbishment. This just exacerbated the situation of the decaying road infrastructure Kouga inherited from the previous administration.
This changed a year or two ago when the Council, under the leadership of Mayor Horatio Hendricks, could start freeing up funding for the resealing of roads. Progress was slow, and they needed much more funding to make a demonstrable difference with road infrastructure. This eventually led to Council obtaining a loan for R200 Million. This to accelerate its road resealing and refurbishment program.

Recently, Kouga’s young new Mayor, Hattingh Bornman, had the privilege to officially launch the massive new road refurbishment program. An extraordinary achievement for a municipality that was bankrupt only 8 years ago!
This, ladies and gents, is how you rebuild a broken municipality. Firstly, the voters must give an outright mandate to a responsible political party. One with a track record of service delivery. Thereafter, the following must happen. The Council must root out corruption, appoint qualified officials, and fix its finances. Then it must accelerate maintenance expenditure, and adhere to good governance principles.

This is the Kouga story. And it could be the story of every other broken municipality in South Africa.

Active Citizenry

Lastly, it would be remiss of me not to mention that Kouga has a very strong and active citizenry who has worked alongside the municipality to fix their municipality. This clearly indicates that if you want to fix your municipality, you can’t stand on the sideline!

Here is a shoutout to every one of the voters in Kouga who were hungry enough to make change a reality in their municipality. You deserve the change you voted for and that you get to experience every day!
– Retief Odendaal

 

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