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Minister Sisulu must intervene in NMB water crisis

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Dear MyPE

The water crisis that Nelson Mandela Bay is currently facing is deepening and it is clear that Nelson Mandela Bay’s ANC-led Coalition of Corrupt government has no idea how to deal with it.

The Democratic Alliance has once again written to the Minister of Water and Sanitation, Lindiwe Sisulu, to request her department’s urgent intervention.

Since March this year the DA has been calling for water engineers to be seconded to the Metro by the Department of Water and Sanitation, but to no avail.

Nelson Mandela Bay has not reached day zero. We have water in our dams and water from the Nooitgedacht Low Level Water Scheme. This inept government is not able to manage the water – we have reached Day Incompetence and nothing more.

The DA has reliably learnt that Eskom has given the municipality notice that it intends cutting power to the Nooitgedacht Low Level Water Scheme to conduct maintenance tomorrow, Friday, 11 September.

If this goes ahead, it will cause even further disruptions to the Metro’s already severely unstable water supply.

DA NMB Cllr Morne Steyn has also submitted a motion of exigency to the meeting of the Municipal Public Accounts Committee (MPAC) that sat today.

Cllr Steyn’s motion called for an urgent report to be prepared and provided to the MPAC committee as to the cause of the recent ongoing water outages to large areas of NMBM.

He also requested that an urgent action plan be prepared and implemented by the Infrastructure Engineering and Energy (IE&E) directorate to prevent a re-occurrence of water outages to the NMBM, considering the dire water situation the Metro faces.

The motion was adopted, and it was resolved that the chairperson of the committee, Phumza Tshanga, would also approach the Speaker, Cllr Buyelwa Mafaya, self-styled “interim” executive mayor, Tshonono Buyeye, and the Member of the Mayoral Committee for IE&E, Cllr Mongameli Bobani, to call an urgent Infrastructure and Engineering committee meeting by no later than next week Monday.

The DA continues to fight to save the lives and livelihoods of the people of Nelson Mandela Bay. We can fix this mess – we have done it before, and we can do it again.

Regards

NMB Cllr Nqaba Bhanga
DA EC Provincial Leader and NMB Mayoral Candidate

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