After 33 days, Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality’s call centre is finally up and running again

Communications giant MTN on Tuesday confirmed that it had settled its dispute with the Nelson Mandela Bay metro, which had led to it disabling the municipality’s phone services, rendering the service delivery call centre non-operational for 33 days.

The disruption hampered service delivery across the metro, leaving residents unable to report issues like water leaks, burst pipes and power outages.

The municipality announced earlier on Tuesday that residents could now access the electricity department through the call centre and no longer had to phone a landline number.

There have been complaints in council meetings that the call centre, which is a toll-free number, cannot access the electricity department, as the electricity department created its own structure. As a result, people with limited airtime were struggling to report and follow up on power outages.

MTN said, “MTN has been engaging constructively with the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality regarding the communication services that were affected. The matter has been resolved amicably, and all communication services have now been restored.”

The member of the mayoral committee (MMC) for corporate services, Mkhuseli “Khusta” Jack, did not respond to questions on Tuesday on whether officials would be held accountable for the outage, which was caused by a multimillion-rand billing dispute.

Read more: DA publishes mayor’s email address for complaints after metro’s phones don’t work for a month

At the last council meeting, held on 30 September, the outgoing acting city manager, Ted Pillay, said that while the invoices were “incorrect”, he had instructed city officials to pay MTN to have services restored, adding that the contract had another nine months to run, so the situation could be sorted out later.

It took another two weeks for the services to be restored.

Read more: No cellphones, no call centre for a month — Nelson Mandela Bay metro’s contract drama

Earlier in October, councillor Lance Grootboom said the outage was the direct result of the city owing MTN more than R7-million.

“This failure underscores serious inefficiencies within [the departments of] Corporate Services and Budget and Treasury, compounded by a lack of oversight from the executive mayor, who continues to shift blame instead of holding the acting city manager and departmental officials accountable.

“MMC Jack has failed to expedite a resolution, while MMC Khanya Ngqisha, responsible for Budget and Treasury, has delayed action and neglected to intervene effectively. Both should have actively monitored the contract and taken decisive steps to prevent payment delays, ensuring that phone lines remained operational and municipal services continued uninterrupted.”

The metro’s contract and supply chain management has been identified as a major issue that needs rectification.

Around the same time, an outage on councillors’ cellphones was caused by the metro switching service providers from Vodacom to Telkom, said Pillay. This outage, however, lasted for only a day.

On Friday, the DA’s caucus leader in Nelson Mandela Bay, Rano Kayser, said the new cellphone numbers of council officials had not yet been distributed to councillors. DM