A new year presents an opportunity to get rid of bad habits and adopt new ideas and behaviours.
In that spirit, the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber proposes 10 new year’s resolutions for our metro leadership, practical solutions that can deliver tangible results and positive change.
• Political stability: Politicians must put the best interests of the people first.
Instead of wasting energy on squabbling, focus efforts on holding committee and council meetings on schedule and making decisions.
This will enable metro officials to get on with their jobs of delivering services, and engender greater respect for the ability of politicians to put differences aside and lead in the common interest.
• Fill leadership vacancies: The municipality is a R15bn operation and the city manager effectively its CEO, who should be supported by a solid leadership team to drive implementation of strategic priorities.
There have been 36 acting and permanent city managers in place since 2009, which has directly affected the stability of the administration.
Too many executive and senior positions are vacant or occupied by individuals on a long-term acting basis.
This is a critical risk, affecting service delivery and organisational sustainability.
Strengthen the HR function, advertise vacancies and conclude competent appointments timeously.
• Hold everyone accountable for their actions: Implement disciplinary action timeously, and without fear or favour.
At the same time, hold residents and businesses accountable by enforcing municipal bylaws and regulations — for example, dealing with illegal electricity connections and water theft, and the health and environmental effects of illegally operating businesses.
• Maintain what we have: Develop and implement a comprehensive, integrated infrastructure maintenance plan
— for water treatment, sewerage and stormwater, electricity distribution and and other physical infrastructure that support business, residents’ quality of life and tourism.
• Get ahead of climate change: The effect of climatechange-driven extreme weather was seen in the flooding in KwaZulu-Natal in 2022 and is still ongoing in repairing infrastructure and resettling communities to safer, higherlying areas.
Clean stormwater drains and canals, get sewage pumps and water treatment works in full working order. And maintain them.
Preserve and create natural drainage and wetland systems, and remove alien vegetation from our river courses, to absorb heavy rainfall.
These actions hold opportunities for employment creation and green economy business ventures such as Hive Hydrogen’s R100bn planned green ammonia production facility.
Our Bay has the potential to be the green capital on the African continent.
• Manage water more efficiently.
Maximise available treated water by systemically targeting and fixing leaks.
We showed this in the Business Chamber’s Adopt-a-Leak intervention targeted at residential and connection leak “hotspots”, which has saved more than 1.5-million litres of clean water a day.
Best practices from this exercise should be adopted by the municipality, and a publicprivate partnership to assist indigent households with maintenance and fixing leaks should be explored.
• Be more developmentfriendly: Get the structures and capacity in place to process rezoning applications and development plans timeously, to enable property developments that support economic growth and job creation.
• Provide secure electricity supply: Uninterrupted electricity supply is critical for energyintensive manufacturers that lead job creation in their own operations and into downstream suppliers.
Improve security — guards, cameras, alarms, armed response — for substations to guard against theft, vandalism and resulting outages affecting residents and industries.
(This also applies to other essential public and economic infrastructure.)
Expand flexible load-shedding schedules for large manufacturing operations to protect productivity, export orders and jobs.
Support renewable energy initiatives and power-banking agreements, such as the chamber-driven Renewable Energy Cluster initiative to secure a renewable energy generation facility to support high-energy manufacturers and reduce the load on the municipal grid.
• Facilitate a safer business environment: Take the lead in forging a social compact between local government, the
SA Police Service, business and civil society to address the rampant theft and vandalism of cables and other public and economic infrastructure.
The same applies to rapidly escalating hijackings targeted at theft of catalytic converters.
Nelson Mandela Bay is the hub of this critical export-orientated industry and we need to protect it.
• Accept business as a partner: Businesses across the metro are forming clusters, under the banner of the business chamber, to address common challenges in their areas.
This gives the municipality a single point of contact to consolidate issues and work collaboratively with businesses that want to help in getting the Bay working again.
As with all new year’s resolutions, the critical success factor is implementation.
The business community stands ready to work together with the municipality.
Together, we can build back better and end 2023 in a better state than we started.