LETTER: Recipe for disaster

I confidently predict that the task team to be led by presidency director-general Phindile Baleni and senior ANC KwaZulu-Natal official Mike Mabuyakhulu (already a recipe for disaster with two leaders), will be as effective as President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Eskom “turnaround” task team (“Ramaphosa sets up team to ‘reposition’ Durban and fix port”, April 4).

The eThekwini municipality and the port of Durban are both lost causes. The corruption, mismanagement, inefficiency and ineptitude are endemic and these two appointments will do little to improve matters.

The previous ANC mayor (now an MPL), city manager and 20 ANC councillors, city employees and tenderers are all still on trial for corruption five years after the rot was called out and former ANC KwaZulu-Natal finance MEC Belinda Scott was appointed deputy mayor in August 2019 with a specific mandate to root out the problems and turn the city around.

Scott had all the authority of the presidency and a direct line to Ramaphosa himself, yet lasted less than two years, failed completely and resigned in February 2021. As chair of the city’s finance, security and emergency services committee, she said the poor state of the municipality’s adjustment budget was “indicative of a city that did not have a credible budget”.

Things have only got worse since 2021. Both the port and the city’s infrastructure are in a wretched state. Billions are owed to the city, which has just emerged from a three-week-long crippling refuse collection strike that the ANC mayor and his cronies were seemingly unable or unwilling to resolve. 

This latest desperate measure by Ramaphosa, six weeks before the general election, is typical of The Hollow Man and will fail to have any effect.

Mark Lowe
Durban

JOIN THE DISCUSSION: Send us an email with your comments to letters@businesslive.co.za. Letters of more than 300 words will be edited for length. Anonymous correspondence will not be published. Writers should include a daytime telephone number.