The Democratic Alliance (DA) in uMgungundlovu District voted against the ANC’s budget in council today. We cannot support a budget that raises water tariffs by 13% while service delivery keeps falling.
Residents are being asked to pay more for less. Water supply across the district has declined, yet the ANC’s answer is to hand the bill for its own failures to the people of uMgungundlovu.
We requested the standard affordability tables during the budget process and were never furnished with them. National Treasury asked for the same tables. Council pushed the budget through regardless.
The municipality also gave us no evidence that it tried to challenge the increase in bulk water costs before passing that cost on to residents.
The figures tell the story. The municipality loses R165 million a year in bulk water through its own inefficiencies. It collects only 60% of the money it is owed, and residents carry the resulting shortfall year after year. National Treasury’s norm for repairs and maintenance is 8%, this budget funds that line at just 1.2%. Underfunding maintenance is how you end up losing water and losing supply. This is the core of the problem.
The gap between rising costs and declining service grows wider every year. UMgungundlovu can close that gap by running its water services efficiently and collecting what residents already owe. Charging households more will not fix a system that leaks R165 million in water.
Both the Auditor-General and National Treasury have repeatedly told uMgungundlovu to focus its budget on its core mandate, water and sanitation. Instead, money keeps going to extras that amount to public relations events and change nothing in residents’ daily lives.
UMgungundlovu needs an administration that plans ahead and delivers. Residents should not be the budget’s last line of defence against the municipality’s own failures.
We cannot vote to make residents poorer to cover for a municipality that cannot account for its own water. Fix the leaks, collect what is owed, maintain the infrastructure, and spend the money on water and sanitation. That is the job.
On 12 June 2026 the DA will hand over a memorandum to the uMgungundlovu District Municipality, together with petitions from residents across every local municipality it serves, setting out how dissatisfied residents are with this budget and the steady decline in their water services.