EDITORIAL | Extreme frustration grows over BCM’s stream of empty promises

The Eastern Cape’s residents are generally ill-served by its municipalities, most of which are ANC-controlled. Residents are expected to pay rates and services and get little in return. In far too many municipalities, including the two metros, water, wastewater and electricity infrastructure is dilapidated, rubbish collection is intermittent, municipal rubbish dumps are poorly maintained and roads are potholed.

It leads to a poor quality of life for millions of people in this province where stinking sewage leaks and spills everywhere, taps are too often dry, uncollected rubbish rots in suburbia and electricity outages are frequent. No wonder this province also has the highest unemployment rate in the country. Businesses don’t want to invest in areas where survival requires circumventing municipal service failure.

Paying for non-existent services while having to install solar panels or generators, rainwater tanks and water treatment facilities all becomes prohibitively expensive. To add insult to this profound injury, those same ratepayers also have to foot the bill for numerous forensic reports and investigations into failed municipal projects that have been fleeced by corruption. To top it all, municipalities like BCM then reportedly fail to cooperate with the Special Investigating Unit’s investigations into its malfeasance — despite having to pay for it.

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Eastern Cape unit head Mike Koya told parliament’s standing committee on public accounts (Scopa) that senior municipal officials at both Buffalo City metro and OR Tambo district municipality had persistently failed to cooperate with investigations. BCM reportedly declined to hand over an EY forensic report into its disastrously corrupt and inept Mdantsane swimming pool project, which remains unusable despite R70m being poured into it. Despite presumably paying EY to conduct the forensic investigation and produce the report, BCM claims it requires EY’s permission to pass it onto a third party. It seems absurd that a service provider paid to produce a report can then dictate who may have sight of it.

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