South Africa - Durban - 04 March 2026 - Statue of the iconic Oliver Reginald Tam 'Water and light faults should be the main priorities of the eThekwini municipality, not statues'
Image: TUMI PAKKIES
How many more times do I have to beg and plead with the ANC-led eThekwini Municipality to fix faults.
Streetlight pole number 10, in Blenford Crescent, Sunford, Phoenix just needs a photo cell to switch on at dusk and off at dawn. For at least 10 months, complaints to the municipality led only to new reference numbers, and no action.
Directly opposite the aforesaid street light is a water leak that the municipality has known about for five months. Again, all that comes of phone calls are reference numbers.
All this happens while the municipality spends a fortune on changing the names of streets and buildings, expensive statues, and selling prime land in Phoenix for less than 4c a square metre.
How does any of that benefit Durban’s residents?
And please, don’t try to deflect from your shockingly bad service delivery by blaming the white man, boer, apartheid, and – the new one now – Indian businessmen. Get the basics right first. Why can’t you be as efficient as the Cape Town lot? | Zahir Danbar Phoenix
The DA in uThukela is deeply concerned but not surprised by the latest confirmation that the district municipality is among the top 10 municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal for Unauthorised, Irregular, Fruitless and Wasteful (UIFW) expenditure.
In a letter dated April 15, the MEC for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA) identified uThukela for R1.314 billion in UIFW in the 2024/2025 audited Annual Financial Statements.
Even more alarming is Dr VJ Mthembu’s governance report, which reveals that in March – after the adoption of the 2026 funding plan in December 2025 – the municipality incurred R69.53 million in fruitless expenditure and R60.45m in irregular expenditure – over R130m wasted in a single month under the failed IFP government.
We have warned the IFP administration for years, through our SAHRC complaint in 2020, the Water Woes Petition in 2022, multiple forensic reports, and countless letters and motions, that their failure to manage finances, implement recommendations, and root out corruption would lead to this crisis. Those warnings were ignored.
The IFP’s dismal failure to turn around the municipality has now pushed us to the edge of financial collapse. With employee costs at 61% of operating expenditure and revenue collection collapsing, they still want to impose a 20% above-inflation tariff increase on our struggling residents, all the while taps remain empty.
We will not support this unjustified tariff hike. Residents should not be forced to pay for the IFP’s incompetence and protection of the guilty.
After all internal avenues of accountability have been blocked, we are proceeding with court action to compel uThukela District Municipality to fulfil its constitutional duty to provide basic water and sanitation services and to enforce sound financial governance.
The people of uThukela and our municipal workers deserve far better. We will continue to fight until accountability is restored and service delivery is fixed. | Cllr Thys Janse van Rensburg DA uThukela Chairperson
We have built an entire mythology around the leader who stands alone. The founder who outworks everyone. The CEO who sees what others miss. The executive who carries the weight so the organisation doesn’t have to.
It is a compelling story. It is also quietly one of the most damaging ones in business.
The leaders who endure, not just for a year or a cycle, but across decades of high-consequence decision-making, are not the ones who carry more. They are the ones who built the right room around them.
A trusted circle of peers who challenge without agenda, who hold them accountable without politics, who understand the altitude without needing it explained. That circle has always existed for the most enduring executives in the world. What is striking is how rarely it is built with intention.
Isolation is one of the least discussed realities of senior leadership. The higher you climb, the fewer people can speak to you plainly. Your team needs you to be certain. Your board needs you to be strategic. Your investors need you to be confident. There is almost no formal space in professional life where a CEO or founder is simply a peer among peers, held, challenged, and sustained by people with equal skin in the game.
The consequences of this are not just personal.
“As I have seen firsthand, when clarity at the top starts to erode, it does not stay there. It moves through the business. The decisions become marginally slower. The thinking becomes fractionally narrower. From the outside, it still looks like leadership. From the inside, something important is quietly compressing,” says Craig Kinnear, Founder and CEO of The Foundry Reset.
The question worth asking is not whether you are performing. It is whether the conditions around you are designed to keep you performing, not just this year, but ten years from now.
Sustained excellence at the highest level is not a personality trait. It is an architecture. And like any architecture, it requires deliberate construction.
The leaders who get this right are not extraordinary by nature. They are extraordinarily well-supported by design. | Craig Kinnear The Foundry Reset CEO
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