LOCAL ELECTIONS TOUR: ‘Parallel governance’ — Sundays River citrus farmers fill the cracks in municipal service delivery

When the Sundays River Valley Citrus Producer Forum (the forum) – a group of local citrus producers – began assisting Sundays River Valley (SRV) Municipality with services in 2014, they thought it would be a temporary fix to help an ailing council. More than a decade later, the forum is still forking out millions of rands a year to perform the council’s work. 

“I think we may be in a worse situation now, if you look at the dysfunctionality [within the municipality], despite all the efforts that have been made,” Hannes de Waal, the CEO of the Sundays River Citrus Company and chairman of the forum, told Daily Maverick. 

The forum, Sundays River Valley Cooperative and Sundays River Valley Collaborative were established to deal with the challenges in the area, after service delivery protests in the municipality turned violent in 2014. 

The producer forum is a voluntary organisation representing more than 95% of the producers and pack houses in the region. Members of the forum pay a levy per export carton and the funds are used to provide and maintain basic services to communities. 

De Waal says the forum has three legs: security, services and community development. About 50% of the levy collected from members, De Waal said, goes toward security systems for producers in the region and employing two full-time security coordinators.

The remaining legs of the organisation include the Sundays River Valley Collaborative, which “works full-time with the community”, as well as providing and maintaining services to communities such as running water, electricity, sewerage systems and school facilities.

The forum spends about R4.7-million a year on basic services and community development, says De Waal. It is a “substantial amount”, he said, and comes at a cost to other community upliftment projects the private sector could be focusing on. 

“You know, it’s existential at the end of the day. You’re going to survive with whatever cards you are dealt. Whichever party is in power, I don’t really care. It’s about doing what we can do here, in order to improve it for everybody,” he said. 

Worst-run municipality

Sundays River Valley, in the Eastern Cape, is considered to be among the worst-run municipalities in South Africa. The region is one of South Africa’s key production areas for citrus and is also home to the Addo Elephant National Park. Nqweba, formerly Kirkwood, is the seat of the municipality. 

SRV Municipality has received a disclaimed audit opinion from Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke for the past seven years. A disclaimed opinion is the worst possible audit result, and means that the council failed to provide sufficient information or records to show how it used its money. 

In her 2024-25 report on municipal audit outcomes, Maluleke said SRV Municipality’s repeated disclaimed audit outcomes reflected “persistent control weaknesses”. 

“We were unable to audit most of the financial statement items of Makana (Makhanda) and Sundays River Valley (Nqweba), as they did not submit evidence and supporting documents,” she said. 

“The lack of transparency in how municipal funds are utilised reflects entrenched governance failures and avoidance of accountability. Ineffective implementation of provincial treasury support, limited oversight by MPACs (Municipal Public Accounts Committees) and mayors, and ineffective consequence management have normalised non-compliance over the past seven years.” 

In July, SRV Municipality was one of 69 municipalities whose equitable share payments were temporarily blocked by the National Treasury to enforce discipline and ensure public funds were properly managed. 

SRV was one of four municipalities where the ANC failed to submit lists for proportional representation (PR) candidates before the IEC’s deadline. It will still field ward candidates, but its lack of PR positions could significantly dent the party’s chances of maintaining its grip on the council.

In 2021, the ANC won 10 of the council’s 16 seats. Three of the ANC’s seats were PR councillors.

Election Tour

Ahead of the 4 November elections, Daily Maverick traversed the country visiting several municipalities that have been identified by the Auditor-General as being among the worst-run of South Africa’s 257 municipalities.

The management of landfill sites, wastewater treatment facilities and other infrastructure have been flagged by Maluleke as consistent service delivery failures. When Daily Maverick visited the area, we were repeatedly told of sewage spills that plagued communities such as Valencia, near Addo, and Moses Mabhida, near Kirkwood. 

“We’ve helped the municipality with fixing roads… getting equipment from our growers. Often growers have got, you know, yellow machines that are needed to do the work that has to be done… There are farmers here who maintain a big dump because it’s close to their property. They started doing it by themselves [and] it’s costing them quite a lot of money,” said De Waal. 

“But basically, making sure water runs to people, electricity is on and the sewage systems don’t get blocked and become a big problem, is where our focus is,” he said. 

When Daily Maverick spoke to De Waal earlier in the year, the relationship between the municipality and the Sundays River Valley Citrus Producer Forum was informal, and had been since its inception, but he said the forum was expected to debate establishing a more formal agreement with the municipality in the coming weeks. 

“We tried to put one in place in 2015, [and] the mayor has now asked for it… it’s complicated… Because you can’t contract them to do what they’re supposed to be doing because, by law, they’re supposed to be doing it anyway,” said De Waal. 

“We’re already spending a substantial amount of money and, at some stage, resistance is going to start setting in. Because if you spend and you get results, it’s fine. But if you spend [and] you’ve got to go back to the farmers and say, listen, the spending is not really bearing any fruit, they’re going to complain.”

In April, there were allegations from local residents that some ratepayers were starting to withhold their payments to the municipality, due to persistent non-delivery of services. De Waal said he was aware of the allegations, but was concerned that this would do more harm than good. 

“We suspect [that some] people may be starting to withhold payments that they have to make to the municipality and it’s a dangerous place to be in, because now the problems start accumulating. [The municipality has] got a big revenue collection as well – they tell us about it, and we tell them to use their authority and collect their money,” he said. 

Parallel structures

The situation in Sundays River Valley shows how parallel structures for leadership and problem-solving emerge when there is a breakdown of the relationship between communities and local government. 

Daily Maverick sat down with McBride Screech, director of communications at the Sundays River Valley Collaborative – a nonprofit that brings together stakeholders across different sectors to tackle challenges experienced in the region – to discuss how the current state of affairs was reached. 

The idea for the collaborative emerged after the 2014 service delivery protests in the SRV Municipality, he said. The demonstrations turned violent, leading to the torching of municipal buildings and councillors’ homes in the town of Kirkwood.

Screech described the Sundays River Valley Collaborative as a “parallel structure to the local government”. 

Among the challenges it seeks to tackle, according to its website, are the limited capacity of local government; the dependency of the area on one industry (citrus); and excessive socioeconomic inequalities. It looks at development across a number of areas, including community health and social welfare; education; adult skills development; safety and security; arts and culture; sport and recreation; and economic development.

“The main aim, in fact, is to see where the problem starts so that we can address it. We cannot wait for [the] government to respond, for the municipality to respond… We are just the catalyst. We are… the facilitators for the communities, to include all stakeholders,” explained Screech.

“Most of the time, it’s us who are solving these problems. For instance, we built three computer labs at high schools, costing R487,000 each. People were marching, in fact, rioting because for almost two years, there was no water. The [citrus] growers revived the purification; they bought... pumps, fencing the dams and the water. And the municipality is claiming that, but it’s the growers.”

He noted that the organisation sometimes encountered barriers to its work at the local municipality level, as not all councillors were willing to cooperate with it. However, he emphasised that they aimed to work with all parties in the region and remain apolitical.

On concerns about corruption in local government, he argued that the issues began at the national and provincial levels, before trickling down to the municipality. 

The municipality had not responded to Daily Maverick’s questions at the time of writing. DM

Daily Maverick’s Election Tour is supported, in part, by funding from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation.