By Gcina Ntsaluba Deputy Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) Dr Namane Dickson Masemola met with the Makana Concern Group yesterday morning to address a memorandum of grievances submitted by the community organisation in February 2025. The meeting, led by Archbishop Nkosinathi Ngesi of the Makana Concern Group, focused on the municipality’s persistent service delivery failures and the community’s demand for leadership changes at Makana Local Municipality. Key demands rejected Archbishop Ngesi expressed the community’s disappointment that the Deputy Minister rejected their primary demands to remove the Mayor, Speaker, Municipal Manager, and Chief Financial Officer, despite acknowledging the…
Author: Gcina Ntsaluba
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By Gcina Ntsaluba The Deputy Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs (Cogta) made a second intervention visit to the financially troubled Makana Municipality this week, expressing frustration that previous commitments for improvement have yielded little result. Speaking to councillors and municipal officials during an engagement session held at the City Hall yesterday, Dr Namane Dickson Masemola warned that the municipality’s reputation has been severely damaged by ongoing service delivery failures and financial mismanagement allegations. “From far, it gives an impression that there is a municipality called Makana where money is eaten like chips. Colleagues have got an appetite for…
By Gcina Ntsaluba Public confidence in the South African Police Service (SAPS) has plummeted to historic lows, with just 22% of adults expressing trust in the country’s law enforcement agency, according to new data released by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC). The latest findings from the South African Social Attitudes Survey (SASAS), spanning 27 years of tracking from 1998 to 2024/25, reveal a stark deterioration in police-public relations that researchers describe as a “deepening legitimacy crisis” affecting all nine provinces. Trust never above 50% Perhaps most striking is that throughout the entire survey period, public trust in SAPS never…
By Gcina Ntsaluba Nine private game reserves are challenging the government’s approval of a controversial wind farm near Makhanda in the Eastern Cape High Court, claiming critical environmental protections were ignored in the decision-making process. The Indalo Association, representing reserves including Shamwari, Kwandwe, Lalibela and Kariega, filed court papers in June 2025 seeking to overturn Environment Minister Dion George’s December 2024 decision to approve the 25-turbine Albany Wind Energy Facility. The Martial Eagle factor A striking revelation at the heart of the legal challenge: an active Martial Eagle nest was discovered in the proposed development area during fieldwork in August…
By Gcina Ntsaluba In the heart of Makhanda, a quiet revolution is taking place. At its centre stands Hilton Haakonsen, project manager of the Social Employment Fund (SEF) of the National Arts Festival (NAF), who has spent the past three years turning unemployment into opportunity and despair into dignity. When Haakonse first took on the role in June 2022, Makhanda was in post-Covid-19 crisis. Over 100 illegal dump sites had sprung up all over the city. LItter was everywhere – stormwater drains were blocked. Roads were deteriorating, and infrastructure was crumbling. The city’s state threatened to deter festival-goers from visiting…
By Gcina Ntsaluba Every Thursday morning, Dr Melusi Dlamini would chat with waste pickers making their rounds through his Makhanda neighbourhood. These informal conversations would eventually spark a transformation that has redefined how his students understand environmental justice. Dlamini, a lecturer in Rhodes University’s Department of Anthropology, was struggling to make Mary Douglas’s dense theoretical work on “matter out of place” accessible to his applied anthropology students. Those Thursday morning conversations planted a seed: the same people society renders invisible are performing essential services that keep communities functioning. “I was trying to get students to understand this concept about things…
By Gcina Ntsaluba Six months after a Makhanda High Court order mandating the Eastern Cape Department of Education (DoE) and Department of Transport to provide scholar transport to qualifying learners, 22 000 children still cannot get to school. The crisis has exposed deep systemic failures in how the provincial government manages scholar transport, with officials admitting they lack accurate data and have been operating on unverified information for years. “We are ferrying 103-thousand learners as this stands against a demand of 135-thousand, meaning that there are nearly 22-thousand in need,” said Unathi Binqose, the Eastern Cape Department of Transport spokesperson.…
By Gcina Ntsaluba Residents of Makana Municipality face the prospect of worsening service delivery after National Treasury added the municipality to a list of chronic defaulters, effectively freezing government funding until outstanding tax obligations are settled. The municipality owes R3.7 million to the South African Revenue Service (SARS) in unpaid statutory deductions, prompting Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana to invoke constitutional provisions that allow for the withholding of equitable share allocations and grants. National Treasury has placed 39 municipalities, including Makana and Dr Beyers Naudé (Graaf Reinet), on notice that their 2025-26 equitable-share allocation will be suspended until they demonstrate full…
By Gcina Ntsaluba In Makhanda, where Rhodes University stands as a beacon of learning, Rod Amner has found his calling at the intersection of journalism and education activism. Amner, who teaches at the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies (SJMS), believes that hyper-local media holds the key to meaningful social change. Since 2015, when Professor Sizwe Mabizela took over as Vice-Chancellor at Rhodes University, the town has witnessed a remarkable educational transformation. Through partnerships with schools, high-functioning NGOs like Gadra Education and the Lebone Centre, along with university institutions, a comprehensive pipeline of intervention has emerged – from early…
By Gcina Ntsaluba Dr Phillipa Irvine never intended to become Makhanda’s unofficial champion of urban renewal, but nearly two decades after arriving as a first-year geography student at Rhodes University, she’s leading grassroots initiatives that are reshaping the city’s landscape. The East London-born urban geographer has channelled her academic expertise into tangible community projects, most notably the “Verge of Change” initiative, encouraging residents and businesses to adopt and beautify neglected public spaces throughout Ward 8. “We love a moan, but it’s also good to look at positive things and change the story,” says Irvine, who supervises the project through the…