Picture of Mphuthumi Ntabeni: Menán van Heerden
From the pre-colonial era to post-apartheid liberation, our history rests heavy in the soil and hills of Eastern Cape. The ghosts of colonial founders still linger in the town squares. A long, dispiriting decline over most of these towns has unfolded under the watch of premier Oscar Mabuyane.
Now in his sixth year at the helm and over a decade into provincial leadership, Mabuyane presides over a province staggering beneath the weight of dysfunction. From the failing townships of Butterworth to the under-resourced clinics of Lusikisiki, and from the collapsing municipal infrastructure in Komani to the flooded roads of Port St Johns, the governmental incompetence and corruption are both overwhelming and increasingly routine in the Eastern Cape, where people regard it as the way things should be.
The auditor-general’s latest report for the 2023-24 financial year paints a grim portrait, but it is hardly surprising: R2,7 billion in irregular expenditure, R467,7 million unauthorised payments, R197 million tied to suspected fraud. The very office of the premier, constitutionally tasked with oversight and coordination, was itself found to be in breach of basic controls.
This is no sudden collapse. It is a pattern that has been years in the making, confirmed in successive audit cycles and reinforced by the premier’s own inertia. What he now has is a tendency for false claims and for taking credit for national government infrastructure development, like SANRAL roads, as provincial competence.
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This is no sudden collapse. It is a pattern that has been years in the making, confirmed in successive audit cycles and reinforced by the premier’s own inertia. What he now has is a tendency for false claims and for taking credit for national government infrastructure development, like SANRAL roads, as provincial competence.
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In 2021-22, the auditor-general declared that 83% of municipalities in the Eastern Cape were either dysfunctional or on the brink of collapse. In 2020-21, financial controls were found to be in open regression. As early as 2019-20, irregular expenditure had already soared to R4,7 billion, suggesting a system less in need of reform than resuscitation.
The province’s healthcare system, once a site of post-apartheid aspiration, is now buckling. According to the auditor-general, 95% of public clinics failed to meet minimum operational standards – a figure driven by dilapidated infrastructure, expired medical supplies and the systematic breakdown of supply chains. In education, barely 20% of performance targets were met in the last fiscal year. Meanwhile, R100 million in infrastructure funds meant for school and road projects was returned unspent – a silent testament to paralysis within.
In towns like Mount Ayliff and Ngqeleni, where youth unemployment eclipses 60%, frustration is now paired with fatalism. "We stopped expecting anything years ago," said one municipal employee in Mthatha who asked not to be named. "We know the money disappears before it ever gets here."
Recurring floods in the province have become a grim fixture of Eastern Cape life. But each year, the response appears less coordinated than the last. Despite clear weather alerts and established disaster protocols, Mabuyane has repeatedly failed to lead from the front. In a widely circulated editorial in the Cape Times, political analyst Thamsanqa Malinga remarked that Mabuyane "shone in his absence”.
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Recurring floods in the province have become a grim fixture of Eastern Cape life. But each year, the response appears less coordinated than the last. Despite clear weather alerts and established disaster protocols, Mabuyane has repeatedly failed to lead from the front. In a widely circulated editorial in the Cape Times, political analyst Thamsanqa Malinga remarked that Mabuyane "shone in his absence”.
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Relief efforts have routinely been delayed. Emergency budgets are misallocated or vanish entirely. The recent flood victims of Mthatha and surroundings waited days before they could see their provincial government’s relief efforts. Meantime, NGOs like Gift of the Givers were there the following day after the disaster. These failures, the AG notes, are not acts of God, but consequences of "absent planning and misaligned response systems”.
In 2021, the public protector revealed that R450 000 earmarked for the memorial service of the late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was unlawfully diverted to fund upgrades on Mabuyane’s private residence. The incident, though shocking, was not isolated. AfriForum has since pressed for money laundering charges related to R3,3 million in memorial funds, suggesting a broader scheme of misappropriation. Nothing has happened yet. No accountability or redress for public funds. What we get is an illusion of accountability through reported endless SUI investigations, as is happening with the corrupt misappropriation and disappearance of funds for the bogus stadium at Lesseyton.
Calls for reform have grown louder from opposition political parties, from the Public Servants Association and from parliamentary oversight bodies such as SCOPA. Yet, these demands appear to ricochet off a wall of impunity.
This is the auditor-general’s common refrain in almost all government institutions of the Eastern Cape: "Leadership did not exercise adequate oversight" and "Consequence management was ineffective." It has become an annual lament. In Alfred Nzo District, only 13% of a R123 million infrastructure grant was spent. Such lapses are not aberrations, but the norm in what analysts increasingly describe as an "extractive governance model”.
If George Orwell warned against euphemism in the face of truth, it would be appropriate now to abandon the language of bureaucratic failure and speak plainly. What has unfolded in the Eastern Cape is not merely a case of underperformance. It is a prolonged betrayal of public trust. It is a deliberate toleration of waste, rot and regression, enabled by a leadership culture that confuses incumbency with immunity.
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If George Orwell warned against euphemism in the face of truth, it would be appropriate now to abandon the language of bureaucratic failure and speak plainly. What has unfolded in the Eastern Cape is not merely a case of underperformance. It is a prolonged betrayal of public trust. It is a deliberate toleration of waste, rot and regression, enabled by a leadership culture that confuses incumbency with immunity.
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Clinics in places like Libode and Cala now function as holding stations for the forgotten. Schools in Matatiele have neither textbooks nor running water. Roads near Mbizana collapse in storms and are never rebuilt. And yet, year after year, the same patterns are repeated, and the same hands remain on the levers.
Oscar Mabuyane’s continued tenure stands not as a testament to his leadership, but as a monument to what has been allowed to wither. The auditor-general’s cumulative findings are a ledger of loss – quantitative proof of a decade in which state capacity was not merely eroded, but willingly hollowed out.
South Africa’s constitutional democracy rests on the principle that no official is above scrutiny. Yet, in the Eastern Cape, that premise is collapsing brick by brick, grant by grant. If no action follows this latest report, it may not be the last chapter, but it will be one more in the slow undoing of a province that once promised so much.
Correction, or consequence, is no longer a political preference. It is a moral imperative. The Eastern Cape, a land of political legend and the area that has suffered most since the British colonial era, deserves better.
- For information and stats, I drew mostly on public data from the auditor-general’s PFMA reports (2019-2024), the public protector’s 2021 report and recent coverage on Algoa FM, in the Cape Times and in SCOPA parliamentary records.
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The post Reign of ruin: Oscar Mabuyane and the Eastern Cape’s lost decade first appeared on LitNet.
The post Reign of ruin: Oscar Mabuyane and the Eastern Cape’s lost decade appeared first on LitNet.