Sewage spills, service cuts, repeated audit failures — inside one of SA’s worst-run municipalities

There is a pattern to weekday evenings during the citrus harvesting season in the Eastern Cape’s Sundays River Valley (SRV) Municipality. Scores of workers – pickers and packers – stream from the farms that make up much of the area, piling into buses that ride bumper to bumper along the roads between the surrounding settlements. The evening sun cuts through the haze of dust kicked up on the street corners where people are dropped off to make the final trudge home.

In Valencia, a settlement of blended formal and informal housing just outside of the renowned Addo National Elephant Park, Daily Maverick meets a few farmworkers on the move. It’s day three of our reporting trip in the valley, where we have been tasked with learning more about a local municipality with the ignominious reputation of being one of the worst-run in South Africa.

Unieunica Sipango confirms the area’s challenges: “For two months we’ve had no water.” 

She laments the potholed roads in the informal settlement Hopetown, where she lives, and the lack of access to toilet facilities and electricity. Asked if she believes the SRV Municipality has been doing enough, Sipango says no. 

“We are not happy at all… We have children, we have old people. It is so difficult,” she said. 

Sipango plans to cast her ballot on 4 November in South Africa’s local government elections, but isn’t optimistic it will make a difference. 

“For how many years have we been voting? I was born in 1989, and still, when I vote, nothing changes. I have children now [and] I’m still struggling.”

Election Tour

Ahead of the 4 November elections, Daily Maverick traversed the country visiting several municipalities that have been identified by the Auditor-General as being among the worst-run of South Africa’s 257 municipalities.

A municipality in crisis

In 2014, service delivery protests in the SRV Municipality turned violent. Municipal buildings and councillors’ homes in the town of Kirkwood were burnt, and roads were blocked with burning tyres and wood. The riot was reportedly rooted in residents’ bitterness over unfulfilled state promises in an area facing many challenges such as high unemployment, potholed roads and poor sanitation infrastructure.

Over a decade later, the local council continues to meet in a prefabricated building on the site of the municipal buildings that were burnt down. What was once a temporary solution appears to have become permanent. 

Read more

Taps remain dry after three months in Sundays River Valley

April 11, 2023

And despite some improvements to water and sanitation services, the overall community outlook on the municipality’s capabilities remains bleak. Conversations with residents give the impression of a community that has largely given up on its local government representatives.

The SRV Municipality has received a disclaimed audit opinion – “the worst possible audit outcome” – from SA’s Auditor-General, Tsakani Maluleke, for the last seven years. It is one of seven local municipalities in the country to have received a repeated disclaimed opinion. 

The African National Congress (ANC) currently dominates the municipality, which is led by Mayor Solethu Lucas.

In her latest 2024–25 report, Maluleke said her office had notified the municipality of two material irregularities relating to the mismanagement of landfill sites, resulting in environmental pollution and harm to the public. She has consistently flagged weak internal controls and poor financial management in her reports. 

“The financial and performance management failures contributed to continued wastewater-treatment service delivery failures, including sewage spillages flowing along public pathways and near households, as well as uncontrolled effluent overflow contaminating surface water, groundwater and the surrounding environment,” she said.  

The AG noted that the financial health of SRV Municipality had been a concern for the past two years. MPs told Parliament in October 2025, that the municipality was effectively bankrupt, with debts outstanding including R33-million to Eskom and R65-million to the Department of Water and Sanitation, News24 reported. 

Maluleke’s report indicated that evidence had not been provided by the municipality to confirm the irregular expenditure incurred in 2024-25, but noted a closing balance of R404.19-million. 

“The biggest challenge [for] the municipality is their finances,” Good party councillor Hubert Hendricks told Daily Maverick. “They cannot manage their finances.”

He said that the disclaimed audit opinions year-on-year alone indicated “poor governance”. 

“Every year there is fruitless [and] wasteful expenditure in [our] audit outcomes. That creates loopholes for corruption… If you are not managing the paper trail or giving good oversight over your administration, then you are creating gaps for corruption,” Hendricks said. 

Eastern Cape MEC for Cooperative Governance Zolile Williams acknowledged the persistent service delivery challenges in the SRV Municipality in a response to Daily Maverick. 

“We need the management of that municipality to [honour] its responsibility of ensuring that services are delivered effectively to communities. Secondly, there’s weak governance,” he said, adding the municipality has been without a chief financial officer (CFO) for some time after the previous CFO was suspended. 

“This results in poor financial governance – that is why that municipality is consistently achieving disclaimed audit opinions,” he said. 

He said the provincial government was intervening by deploying officials to the municipality to assist in improving its audit outcomes. 

Tracing the fault lines

So, what does life on the ground in Sundays River Valley look like?

Shortly before Daily Maverick’s arrival in the area, in late April 2026, the Democratic Alliance (DA) in the Eastern Cape laid criminal charges against the SRV Municipality for failing to respond adequately to a major sewage spill in the Valencia area, home to about 6,500 people. The public health crisis had reportedly been an ongoing problem since before 25 March.

“[The situation] is also being made worse by the rain, because the stormwater reticulation system cannot handle that… The main thing is that the mid-pump station was broken, and even after we reported it, nothing was done,” DA councillor Karen Smith said of the factors that led to the litigation.

She noted that it was the first time the DA had opened a criminal case against the municipality, with the aim of putting pressure on it to clean up the area.

Daily Maverick visited the area of Valencia affected by sewage spills, where contaminated water had flooded the roads and leaked onto the local residents’ properties. Community members noted that the wastewater overflows were a recurring problem.

“Our Green Drop [score] for the last two years has been on zero [percent], so it’s an ongoing problem,” Smith said.

In the Green Drop report on the Eastern Cape published in 2025, Sundays River Valley’s Green Drop score was 0.7%. It was reported that none of the supervisors across the four wastewater treatment plants in the area was qualified in terms of the regulations, and that the municipal Water Services Authority did not employ or contract any registered professional engineers or scientists.

These failures were found to pose a serious threat to public health and access to water resources. The root causes of the poor performance were linked to inadequate operation and maintenance, vandalism and the absence of dedicated, ring-fenced financial resources for wastewater management.

The lack of skilled professionals involved in service delivery operation and maintenance in Sundays River Valley appears to be a chronic issue.

Minette Bosman, another DA councillor, said: “We sit with a problem where 70% [of municipal employees] should be people working for the municipality on service delivery, and 30% should be in office. Unfortunately, this has been turned around. We’ve got 70% in office and 30% actually doing the service delivery.”

Smith was frank in her assessment of the roads, describing them as a “massive problem”. She noted that while certain road networks fell under national and provincial mandates, the municipality’s internal roads – including those in the municipal seat of Kirkwood – were not well maintained.

‘It’s only empty promises’

Olwethu Witbooi is a resident of an informal settlement alongside Valencia. As a wheelchair user, she finds the challenges that come with poorly maintained roads and sewage spill particularly gruelling. Sometimes, when heavy rains flood the streets, she is unable to travel to the local clinic to collect her medication and needs to ask a local community healthworker to assist her. 

Asked whether she believed the municipality was doing its job adequately, Witbooi said: “What job? I barely see a job that they are doing. It’s only empty promises that I see.”

Eben Minnies, another resident in the area, said access to water, sanitation and electricity was a problem for the home he shares with his daughter and her husband. 

“The municipality is very poor. […] How long must these people be without electricity? […] The people are struggling here. You can’t make food or something to drink, nothing,” he said.

“And sometimes there’s no water. You can’t wash, you can’t do anything without water. I think the whole system is corrupt here because the people get money to do something and they don’t do it. All you know is the money is finished.”

Minnies said that if he did vote in the upcoming local government elections, he would vote for the DA, “because that’s the party that’s doing something, at least”. He expressed disappointment in the ANC’s failure to create change. 

Witbooi sees no use in casting her ballot. 

Blow to the ANC 

The ANC has held an outright majority in SRV since 1994. It won 63.5% of the vote, while the DA won 21.7%, in the 2021 local government elections. The ANC’s support has been slowly declining since 2006, and dropped by eight percentage points between the 2016 and 2021 elections. 

When Daily Maverick visited earlier this year, ANC Sarah Baartman regional chair Mabhuti Matyumza was confident that the ANC would retain its majority in November. 

“We cannot talk about coalition partners now, because that would be a sign of a defeat. The truth is that in Sundays River we are going to win that municipality’s majority. I can tell you that some of the problems there are more on service delivery, and the ANC does have the capacity to resolve those issues,” he told Daily Maverick. 

Matyumza said the ANC local election strategy in the Sarah Baartman region would be for each sub-region to establish a “war room” where its responsibility would be to “get close to the people” to address the service delivery challenges in these areas. 

“The DA in Sundays River will never win that municipality, because we have a clear programme that responds to the masses of our people,” he said. 

SRV was one of four municipalities where the ANC failed to submit lists for proportional representation (PR) candidates before the IEC’s deadline. It will still field ward candidates, but its lack of PR positions could significantly dent the party’s chances of maintaining its grip on the council.

In 2021, the ANC won 10 of the council’s 16 seats. Three of the ANC’s seats were PR councillors.

The DA said it believed that the SRV community was starting to lose faith in the governing ANC, but noted that when people stopped voting for the ANC, they did not necessarily give that support to a different party, but rather stayed away from the polls.

“I think that older people perhaps might stay away. They are not prepared to give their vote to another party. They’re very loyal. But with the [younger generation], I think we’re ready for something here. I’m really positive about that voting group, but we will only see in November if I’m right or wrong,” Smith said.

Daily Maverick sent detailed queries to SRV Municipality but no response was received by the time of publication. DM

Daily Maverick’s Election Tour is supported, in part, with funding from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.