Long-standing plans to move the Amathole District Municipality’s (ADM) headquarters to one of its six local municipalities, and outside Buffalo City Metro, have been resuscitated.
After spending millions on office rental over the years, the cash-strapped district is forging ahead with plans to build offices and a council chamber..
The district’s headquarters are set to move to Qumrha (previously Komga), where there are plans to erect a council chamber and offices for its 408 officials, seven full-time councillors and 14 employees from the district’s development agency, Aspire.
This was revealed on Thursday by ADM mayor Anele Ntsangani while delivering his state of the district address in Qumrha.
ADM has a total staff complement of 1,400 employees and 47 councillors, but not all are based at the head office.
Ntsangani said the district had already received confirmation from Great Kei municipal authorities for the availability of land for their envisaged project.
'When we were ushered in as a new leadership, we were tasked to, among other things, vacate the offices for which we paid over R3m a month,” Ntsangani said.
“We have since done that and now we are paying about R1m a month.
“In addition, we have now decided to erect new offices and a council chamber in Qumrha.
“We have already written to the council of Great Kei for available land and Great Kei has given us the erf number which is already zoned but not yet serviced.
“This is because we are committed to moving from BCM.”
Great Kei mayor Ngenisile Tekile, speaking before Ntsangani’s address, confirmed the plans, saying ADM’s move to his small municipality “will not only enhance government capabilities, but will bring service delivery closer to our people”.
In May, it was reported that a little more than a year after ADM vacated its lavish Chiselhurst head offices in East London, because of affordability issues, it was back in the market, searching for new premises to lease.
The Chiselhurst premises were rented for R36m a year, with the district having paid more than R820m between 2014 and 2023 for the premises.
After leaving the Chiselhurst offices, ADM moved to much cheaper premises in Quigney, at a monthly rental of R867,000.
However, a few weeks ago they placed an advert searching for new rental space in East London for the next three years.
They plan to occupy their new premises by February 2025, with the construction in progress.
In 2015, ADM had been expected to finally move to new headquarters in Stutterheim after the council instructed then municipal manager Chris Magwangqana to approach the National Treasury for funds.
A council report tabled on July 22 2015 indicated that the municipality had to move, not only because its current offices were outside its geographical jurisdiction, but also because many of its rented offices were scattered among different buildings.
When that did not materialise, the district municipality announced in May 2021 that it was relocating to the coastal hamlet of Chintsa, 30km from East London.
At the time, the municipality said land had already been identified in Chintsa.
However, early in 2023, it was reported that long-term plans for ADM to construct its own headquarters in either Chintsa or Stutterheim to avoid continuing having to pay millions in rent, had fallen flat, with Ntsangani saying the council could not afford such a move.
However, he now seems to have changed his tune with the announcement of Qumrha as the new seat of ADM offices.
In his address on Thursday, Ntsangani said even though the financial situation of his municipality was improving slightly, bad audit outcomes and low revenue collection “still remain a daunting challenge”.
He said during the last financial year, certain commitments to turn the municipality around and improve the lives of its citizens were made, and to date “significant progress has been recorded in delivering on those promises, although a lot more still needs to be done”.
In his state of the district address in 2023, he said he had raised numerous challenges faced by ADM, such as dysfunctional schemes, lack of repairs and maintenance, filled pit-latrine toilets, water shortages in some villages, vandalism of infrastructure and a bloated organigram, adding that a lot had been done to address some of those challenges in the past year.
He, however, revealed that ADM still had a backlog of more than 33,000 households without sanitation facilities.
He said this issue was being attended to.
Ntsangani said water tanks had been procured and delivered to many needy villages in the district, and he committed to investing more in the protection of water and sanitation infrastructure because of increased incidents of vandalism.
Though progress had been slow in the implementation of the district’s financial recovery plan, due to financial constraints, Ntsangani said: “It is important to note that all directorates are contributing to ensure that ADM recovers from the current financial constraints and be[comes] a financially viable municipality.”
He said ADM had received money for the implementation of poverty alleviation programmes and job creation within the district, adding that “creating employment opportunities and fighting poverty must be high on our agenda and should be everybody’s business”.
ADM’s R 2.5bn budget, Ntsangani said, “is skewed towards addressing historic imbalances in infrastructure development”.
“In the last financial year, we spent only 30% of our infrastructure budget due to instability.
“This financial year, we have recorded significant improvement in our grant funding expenditure,” he said.
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