Endumeni Local Municipality’s young mayor turns things around, but NFP says slow development is driving residents to big cities
· Citizen
Driving through Dundee is quite the experience for someone raised in the big city. The slow daily life is normal for a small town that relies on agriculture, mining, and occasional Anglo-Boer War tourists. While poverty and struggle are evident on many faces, basic service delivery in the town seems to work better than those around it. The street lights work, and the roads are pothole-free, a rare sight in “richer” Joburg.
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Much of this has been attributed to one of KwaZulu-Natal’s youngest mayors, Mcebo Mkhize (29), who says running a functional municipality means being able to deal with corruption head-on without fear or favour.
Mkhize is the mayor of Endumeni Local Municipality (ELM), and was elected in November 2024. He serves in a DA-IFP coalition. He told The Citizen that he has learnt to make tough decisions, including firing those who have been found to be stealing from the public purse.
“Consequence management in this municipality is the order of the day; it is the business of the day. I am sitting with a new municipal manager who recently started, so you can tell what happened to the other one; that is consequence management. We have a new director for technical services who is acting; we have a new chief financial officer; we have a new director for corporate services.
“You will not have issues of corruption if you implement consequence management; you cannot steal public funds, and then it becomes normal. No, we cannot be normal in an abnormal situation,” he said during a sit-down interview with us in his office.
The trip is part of The Citizen‘s travels across the length and breadth of the country to explore the lives, struggles, successes, and frustrations of everyday South Africans ahead of this year’s local government elections.
AG report
Mkhize says when he came in as mayor, the municipality was dysfunctional, with a massive debt to Eskom and negative commentary from the Auditor General of South Africa.
“This municipality was on disclaimer, the worst audit opinion in the country; there were a lot of government failures around the municipality, the structures were not in place. That is when the leadership decided to make those changes, and I was sworn in as a mayor, so we did a turnaround strategy, and really, it yielded good results.
“I took the municipality from a disclaimer to now having a qualified audit opinion. We have improved according to the auditor-general,” he said.
Revenue collection
Mkhize said Endumeni relies on rate collection to ensure continued service delivery to residents and businesses.
“We are collecting rates from properties, from municipal farms, we have got farms as a municipality which we have leased, we have a project to review those leases because they 99-year leases signed off. We need to make them market-related. We also collect rates on refuse collection and also on mining,” he said.
Water and electricity
While many communities in the country are suffering from poor supply of water and electricity, Mkhize said his administration is coming up with strategies to ensure that these services get to residents.
“I inherited Eskom debt over R400 million, so you can see that we are struggling when it comes to the distribution of electricity. We have technical and non-technical losses; some people are stealing electricity and also tampering with municipal infrastructure when it comes to cable theft and so forth.
“I won’t talk much about water since it is not our core function, but as I have said earlier, we are working quite closely with uMzinyathi to assist them and through our public participation unit in terms of dealing with the issues of water. In terms of electricity, we are doing our level best I inherited and Eskom debt which is historical,” he said.
He said the municipality has been granted some funds that will ensure a support plan when it comes to the supply of electricity to communities.
“The National Treasury has given us R75 million, which is going to be done in three tranches, so we are putting some measures for now. We are also discussing with the municipal manager about an Eskom plan to try and deal with these electricity issues,” he said.
Mkhize said part of his work is to also ensure that there are access roads in the municipality as well as looking after parks and gardens.
He said the municipality is also utilising its grants from National Treasury to ensure that traffic lights and street lights are functional.
“We are quite confident that we are dealing with these technical issues, including the robots. There is a grant that is called ESMD from government which assists us; it assists all municipalities, so I do not know why other municipalities are not utilising that grant,” he said.
Hope for a second term in office
According to Mkhize, he has never had a protest outside his offices since he was elected as mayor, and he says this is because he attends to matters urgently.
He hopes to come back as mayor after the 2026 local government elections.
“We as the IFP have learnt to lead with integrity, and we have learnt this from Prince Mangosuthu Buthelezi,” he said.
Following the 2021 local government elections, there were no outright winners, and Endumeni became a hung council. However, the IFP was able to form a coalition with the DA, leaving out the ANC with its five seats in the 13-seat council.
Why are people leaving rural areas?
The National Freedom Party (NFP), in KwaZulu-Natal, says the main concern in many municipalities in the northern parts of the province is that most are rural and struggle to provide basic services such as water and electricity.
The party’s Gregory Ngobese spoke to The Citizen about the challenges affecting uMzinyathi District Municipality and its surrounding municipalities.
“These municipalities are quite rural municipalities, and the biggest challenge we have at uMzinyathi District is water provision, and we have a lot of imbalances in terms of classifications of racial lines, but the main concern we have is water provision and the underdeveloped municipalities.
“There are areas with no electricity, with no access roads, with no shopping centres and in most areas, people still need to travel 50 to 60km just to go to town, which is very draining,” he said.
Ngobese said accessing transport and health care is still a challenge in most of these small municipalities.
“Even where I live in ward 13, Nquthu, we have no clinic; there are no health facilities. The people have to travel,” he said.
Ngobese said young people from uMzinyathi District Municipality, including surrounding towns, chose to look for greener pastures in other parts of the country like Johannesburg and Durban because there are fewer opportunities in their towns.
“There is so much migration from people in rural areas to Joburg, Mpumalanga and other provinces because there is less development in these areas…there is money, there is a plan, but there is no capacity,” he said.
Ngobese says the NFP will put its plans to revitalise municipalities in northern KZN into action should the party win the local government elections.
“The NFP is the only relevant political party that has a clear vision for the people of uMzinyathi and South Africa as a whole,” he said.