MyPE

Community Business Directory, Event Listings, News and Views from Gqeberha, Nelson Mandela Bay

More than 1000 bucket toilets found in one community

By

https://youtu.be/2Wg0-ZIs1yE

Dear MyPE

The Democratic Alliance (DA) will be writing to the self-styled “interim” Mayor of the Nelson Mandela Bay, Cllr Tshonono Buyeye, to request an urgent audit of the number of bucket toilets still in use in the Metro.

Today, 16 July 2020, I was joined by DA NMB Spokesperson for Infrastructure and Engineering, Cllr Masixole Zinto, and PE Northern Areas Constituency Chairperson, Cllr Rano Kayser, in conducting an oversight inspection at Vastrap, Port Elizabeth – where we found 1 050 bucket toilets still in use.

The ANC-led coalition of corruption government has stated that it still needs to eradicate 6 000 bucket toilets in the Metro but finding over 1 000 buckets in one community, places the provided statistics in serious doubt.

The Covid-19 pandemic is sweeping through the country and proper sanitation is of the utmost importance in fighting the virus. Bucket toilets pose an extreme health hazard to our people and cannot be ignored during the global Coronavirus crisis.

In spite of this, the 2020/2021 municipal budget only provides for R373 million for sanitation services to the poor. This is a far cry from the R620 million (2016/2017) and R733 million (2017/2018) that the DA and its coalition partners made available.

Only R5 million has been budgeted to address bucket toilets in the 2020/2021 financial year, in spite of the fact that the City needs R76 million to eradicate this scourge.

While the DA and its coalition partners were in government, we eradicated almost 10 000 bucket toilets, spending R44,88 million (2016/2017) and R47,5 million (2017/2018) to achieve this.

The Metro will receive more than R150 million in additional equitable share from National Treasury which forms of national government’s Covid-19 relief-funding. I will write to “interim” Mayor Buyeye to request that a portion of this funding be directed towards eradicating the bucket system.

The DA will not allow our people to bear the brunt of ANC corruption and lack of capacity – we will fight to move Nelson Mandela Bay forward once again.

Regards

Cllr Nqaba Bhanga
DA EC Provincial Leader

The following two tabs change content below.

Port Elizabethan

This author is a 'catch-all' for occasional articles and letters written to MyPE. The Author of each article can be found in the signature at the bottom of each individual article.