MyPE

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Battle of Maitland – pipe finally being repaired

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Dear MyPE

The Democratic Alliance (DA) is pleased to note that the Maitland main water supply pipe leak is finally receiving attention from the City, after sustained DA pressure on this issue. The tapir of this critical infrastructure was frustrated by the municipality confusing the repair process and peddling false information about the repairs, to cover up for its failures.

The public have a right to know what is going on in their city and frank, timeous information is critical to achieving this objective.

The City suffers many challenges under ANC governance, including faulty equipment, lack of maintenance of infrastructure, vacancies for engineers and inadequate budget to maintain our creaking city infrastructure.

The fact that we have lost in excess of 50 million liters as a result of this leak alone, coupled to a three year accumulative total city water loss that will approach close to R1 billion rand for the entire period, underlines the desperate need for timely interventions to stop the waste.

We call on the municipality to urgently address the root causes of water losses. We believe this can be done by urgently filling all funded vacancies within the department, especially vacancies for certified, Pr Eng. engineers, plumbers, and urgently tabling an infrastructure revival plan that does more than place bandages over broken pipes.

The city has to aggressively begin pursuing additional funding to enable improvements in critical infrastructure maintenance programs by cutting all non-core spending to free up more funding. National grant funding should also be repeatedly revisited for particular projects.

NMB needs to fix the pipes, to fix this metro.

If it doesn’t solve this water crisis, Nelson Mandela Bay’s water security will continue to be a very bleak prospect.

Regards

Dean Biddulph

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NMB Communications

Media Communications at Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality
The Nelson Mandela Bay Metropolitan Municipality Communications Department is responsible for communicating pertinent Municipal news from Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Despatch. Municipality Contact Details. See more articles by NMB Communication's.