Cape Town moves to suspend director following waste management collapse

There is a row between the City of Cape Town mayoral committee and some of the municipality’s senior administration, with bribery allegations, following the collapse of waste collection in the townships. 

Daily Maverick can reveal that a special closed council meeting was called on Monday morning where mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis tabled a motion to place the executive director: urban waste management, Luzuko Mdunyelwa, on suspension. 

This has been approved by the council but councillors who were present said they could not comment because it was a confidential meeting. 

During the meeting, Hill-Lewis confirmed that contractors were hired to clean the filthy townships across Cape Town, at a cost of about R500-million. Contracts started in July 2021 until June 2023 and were running month to month. However, rubbish continued to pile up in and around the Mother City. The city has also had to send in its own staff to carry out the cleaning in areas where contractors were hired to do the job. 

The municipality had received 18,902 complaints, 38% of which were from areas being serviced by contractors between July 2021 and June 2023.

Extortion rackets in some communities compound this, leading contractors to ditch contracts owing to concerns for their workers’ safety. 

Read more in Daily Maverick: Cape Town waste collection companies ditch contracts following deadly shooting, threats and extortion

Cleaning and waste collection in informal settlements have largely relied on external service providers. 

Daily Maverick visited Crossroads and Nyanga, where open fields have become dumping grounds. The city has set up rubbish containers, but they are overflowing. Crossroads is one of the areas affected by extortionists threatening refuse trucks, and services had to be withdrawn. 

In July 2023, after noticing that the municipality was not getting value for its money following complaints from the public and service delivery protests, these services were moved in-house under mayoral committee member for urban waste management Grant Twigg. 

Daily Maverick has seen the new approach and it includes:

• Pilot the insourcing of the cleaning of waste from informal settlements;
• Three-year community-based project, specifically residents residing in informal settlements;
• Opportunity for residents to take responsibility for their own communities;
• Job creation in informal areas – 3,308 work opportunities;
• Improve the informal settlement community environment in terms of cleanliness and hygiene, reduce pollution, littering and the effect of illegal dumping; and
• Enhance education of partnership between the city and informal settlements.

Contractors in areas such as Dunoon, Witsand in Atlantis and Samora Machel in Philippi still have active contracts, since not all of them were cancelled. The city still receives complaints from these areas about rubbish that is not collected, as well as about filthy streets. 

Areas that have been affected include Kanana in Gugulethu, Joe Slovo, some areas in Philippi, Mitchells Plain and Manenberg.

The move to use in-house services, according to sources inside the municipality, did not receive support from some senior administrators, with allegations that they were receiving kickbacks from contractors. The move also stretched the city’s resources because there are not enough refuse trucks and personnel to carry out the project. 

Forensic report

A forensic investigation report, tabled in December 2023, into the collapse of waste-collection services in townships across Cape Town pointed to Twigg and Mdunyelwa as being responsible for the collapse. 

The report, which was tabled at the last council meeting in December, says Twigg and Mdunyelwa undertook the formation of a new “in-house” waste management model without delegated authority.

IOL reported that the report says city manager Lungelo Mbandazayo became aware of the pilot project and after it was found that Mdunyelwa had changed the model without any proper due diligence, he instructed that the external service providers be called back.

Following the leak of the report to the media, opposition parties have been calling for Twigg to be sacked. 

Last week, Twigg told Daily Maverick there has been a problem of cleansing delivery for quite some time in both informal settlements and formal areas because of poor contractor management, and this has been the case before any forensic…