Nelson Mandela Bay had about 35 days of cash in the bank, Lance Grootboom said, with R28 billion in irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure on its books and a collection rate well short of budget. The ACDP's mayoral candidate told Chris Steyn the metro's slide began when the current ANC-led coalition took over, and that the city's problem was leadership, not staff. He pointed to what his party said it delivered with one seat, then two, in earlier coalitions, from thousands of streetlights to keeping factories running through Stage 4 load shedding. He also took on the idea that small parties destabilise councils, named the parties the ACDP would refuse to govern with, and made a faith-based case for "ethical leaders" ahead of the 4 November vote..Listen here.Edited transcript of the interview.Chris Steyn (00:00.952)Long suffering residents in South Africa's big metros are desperate for new administrations to bring back proper service delivery. In Nelson Mandela Bay, the mayoral candidate for the African Christian Democratic Party is Mr. Lance Grootboom. Welcome, Councillor.Cllr Lance Grootboom (00:26.372)Welcome, Chris, and thanks for having me this morning.Chris Steyn (00:29.72)You're welcome. How would you describe the current state of governance in Nelson Mandela Bay?Cllr Lance Grootboom (00:37.322)The current state is not looking good. The last time in terms of our financials, our cost cover ratio indicated that we only have thirty-five days of money in the bank to meet our immediate obligations. And we have seen we've got twenty-eight billion in irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure. And the problem is service delivery has declined in the area and the financial position has an impact. It has not improved at all. I think in June, July, our cash investments also decreased by about 300 million. So we are not sitting at a good spot. Our collection rate has also not improved. We've budgeted on a collection rate of about 80%. Now we are sitting at about 71%. So all of that has a huge impact on our finances and our ability to deliver services here in Nelson Mandela Bay. Then there's the instability of the coalition government because the ANC is leading this coalition here. And the problem is when they took over about two years ago, this is when the decline happened and this is now the impact that our residents are feeling on the ground. Nothing is working, there's no street lights working. We've got a lot of potholes.. Sewage is running through the backyards of residents.And the state of Nelson Mandela Bay is not looking good. It needs change. It needs stability. And if that doesn't happen on the fourth of November, I think Nelson Mandela Bay is heading for trouble. But I have to say, Nelson Mandela Bay has a lot of potential, there's a lot of opportunity. We have the automotive industry here. We've got Isuzu, Ford, Volkswagen, they all are sitting here. We've got the component manufacturers also sitting here. So we've got automotive, manufacturing, and other potential also in tourism and so forth. So we've got a lot to offer, but it will need a stable government.Chris Steyn (02:44.588)You have served in several key positions. What were you able to achieve despite all these challenges?Cllr Lance Grootboom (02:52.926)Yeah, we were in coalitions twice in 2016. That's my first term between 2016 and 2021. We were in coalition when Atholl Trollip was the mayor of the DA. We were in coalition with them, but it was a four-party coalition. And we served in public health. And in public health during that term we did amazing things and we were only there for eighteen months. So in those eighteen months we built eighty-eight public parks and these parks were beautiful. Some of them were illegal dump sites that we've converted into play parks. We did that with about thirty million and normally these guys build one park with one million but we used thirty million and we built eighty eight of them. And that to me was amazing. And then there was the Lysteriosis outbreak somewhere in 2018, And a lot of people died, and there was a huge problem with spaza shops that were operating within our city. And we came up with a plan which we called a Food Blitz programme, and we then use our EHP workers to go out and to go and see what was going on, inspecting. And we started in our CBD areas because we wanted to deal with some of our foreign shops that were not complying by not having registered their business, not having a waste trade agreement, not having a certificate of acceptability. So we wanted to know how they are using, how they are dealing with food, you know, how they are handling food when they're selling it to the public. Now that project was one of our biggest projects because it won the National Environmental Award for the best project in South Africa. And it was aired out on a number of media platforms. And this was a matter that the minister took over of Environmental Affairs and he decided this is something that every municipality has to do. That was one of like I said, that was a very, very, very good project. And it's still currently being used by the municipality, but not at the same rate or in the same way or with the same energy when we were there. And then we also started a recycling project because we wanted to reduce the amount of waste that we take to landfill.Cllr Lance Grootboom (05:13.738)And we had to come up with a plan that we can use our waste to benefit our residents. So we started a two-back system, a pilot project, and that pilot project was introduced to see how residents can divide or separate their waste, and then we can be able to give them an incentive. But we were removed in that time. There came a new government in place, and as a result, all those plans or those projects died. Then we also came back again because we managed to remove the government again during the term between 2016 and 2021. But this time we were serving under DA mayor…And I came back and then I started another project there. We then managed to start a project called Can a City Be Clean in a Day? And we got the community involved, all stakeholders in the city, businesses, academia, everyone. And we said, listen, yeah, let's clean the city. We can do it in a day. We took 160 tons of 160,000 tons of waste to landfill, and that cleaned the city in a day. We won an award for that. For that we became the second cleanest city in the country at the time. AAnd that was all done with one seat. We had one seat in power because we went into a coalition with the DA. We managed one portfolio which was Public Health and we did amazing things there. But I also served during that term in the Municipal Public Accounts committee as the chairperson. And there we dealt with irregular, fruitless, and wasteful expenditure. We investigated, we held people accountable, we suspended a few people, we stopped evergreen contracts. Because there were a number of contracts that were incurring irregular expenditure where we did not know how these service providers were appointed. We also dealt with that,But again, I only served there for just under ten or ten months as the chairperson, but we've done a lot of investigation, a lot of work that is still there that has not been dealt with by the previous chairpersons, and we will have to get back and get those things rolling again because I believe these guys want to now write off that twenty eight billion without an investigation.Cllr Lance Grootboom (07:37.17)That is in our first term. In our second term, I came back and we had two seats this time because people gave us a little bit more power and said, listen, we like what the ACDP is doing, we can see the visible difference. We then came back and I was in 2020, 2022, 2023. This was only for eight months. Under Retief Odendaal, he was the mayor of the DA. We were again in a coalition, but this time it was a nine-party coalition. It was one of the biggest coalitions in the country, very difficult to manage. And then I was in electricity, and electricity was at that time at Stage 4, which was very high. So what we've done there, we we had to come up with a plan to protect our industry. And these guys wanted to when I said these guys, the ANC EFF wanted to shut them down. They used the words White Monopoly Capital. And I knew this was our economy. We have an automotive industry here. If you shut that down, the whole city will collapse. So we came up with what we call a voluntary load shedding schedule for businesses. And we told them, you know, put everything down, let your production line be the only thing that's running to see how much energy you draw. If you reduce your energy to a certain percentage, we will keep you on until Stage 4. And that was amazing. We kept then I remember the 800 businesses falling under our chamber, yeah, business chamber. And we made sure that those businesses, even at Stage 4, were not load shedded. We shed it a little bit more in our residence, but that would be an hour more. But I'm telling you, the business people came to us, the business chamber CEO said to us, Lance, when ACDP was in the portfolio, we haven't had layoffs, we didn't retrench people. We might have walked a little bit for a short time, but nobody lost their jobs at the most difficult time of the economy. And we entered into a partnership with the Business Chamber where we called it the electricity and energy resilience efficiency task team. And that was partnering with business and say, business, come on board, help us to reduce our losses, to make sure we have stable electricity, and that was amazing. We also installed…Cllr Lance Grootboom (09:59.672)…10,000 streetlights at the time. In eight months, 10,000 streetlights. And we had a vandalism problem with some of our streetlights. So we came up with another project which was a pilot project on our Stanford road. Stanford Road is a main road in Nelson Mandela, but it connects a lot of communities. And we came up with a solar high mast light. So it was a high mast light which lit up a big area and we put it in our busiest road. And we put fourteen of them up. They are still working today. They are the only light in that road that lit up that area. And there was a pilot project. And then soon after that we were removed. We dealt with illegal connections, which was our non-technical losses. We went into Motherwell and there were so many people connecting illegally, and it was like electricity running like spider webs over their heads. We had cases of people dying, children tramping on a cable, people unable to cook or boil water because of the tin-like cable that they're using. I went there, I looked at the situation, and we said to our officials, guys, we can't do this, this is not right. Went back, put money aside, or like we say, we diverted the money from less important projects to this project and we then electrified three thousand informal settlements. We put a box, an electric box in a shack and people were having good electricity. At the end of the day we made them paying customers, but what was important, we gave them a rebate. They had a hundred ran hundred watts that we say that we've given for them for free and they were happy because now they have stable electricity, safe electricity, and that is what we have done in a short period of time. We also started a project called We Convert Aluminium into Copper. Now, why did we did that? Because of the vandalism issue. People were chopping our cables, selling it at scrapyards because copper had a good market, market value, and there was a market for that, but there wasn't really a market for aluminium. And we then started to convert all our mainlines with that. And when we were removed before we can go on a public participation to say to the residents to inform them that we have now…Cllr Lance Grootboom (12:23.572)….aluminium and not copper so that the thieves don't need to because they cut this stuff and then they realise this is now aluminium, it's not copper. And they still sell it, but the value is not the same. Some of them just take it maybe to areas to electrify areas and that was a problem to us. So we couldn't get an opportunity to advertise, to inform the residents that we have converted it. We were removed at that time. And since we have been removed… I think we were removed in May of 2023, everything went backwards in the city and we are sitting now where we are with with with money in the bank that is only for thirty-five days and can't pay our suppliers and that's a huge problem that Nelson Mandela Bay have. And that is what the ACDP did in that limited time that we were in power with two seats and that's amazing. Just two seats and we've done that in the electricity department. Which is one of the… I mean it's our economy of our city.Chris Steyn (13:22.862)So would you say that you demonstrated that a vote for a small party is never wasted?Cllr Lance Grootboom (13:29.327)No there's no such thing, Chris. Why do I say that? You think about this. We all are campaigning, we all are going out, we all are trying to convince the residents to vote for us. Every political party is doing it. Why? Because the term is coming to an end. It means that you are losing your seat now. You have to now garner more votes from the residents to say, listen, yeah, make me big again. Now you can have a membership that is hundreds of thousands. But if your members don't go and vote, your books mean nothing. So I believe there's no such thing as a small party. Everybody's numbers are reduced to zero when it's election time. And then you have to get the support. And then when you are in government, there's no such thing because if we were small, then you wouldn't have seen these visible differences. And I tell you, no political party in Nelson Mandela Bay, and it's honest, they've been asked by all the guys, they don't answer. They cannot tell you what they've done.And the good thing about us, we've been faithful as the ACDP with our partners. When we say we go in a coalition with a partner, we mean that and we stay with them. If we say we're not going to work with the ANC, we're not working with the ANC. If we say we're not going to form coalitions, and that's what we've been saying. ACDP has been saying we will work with the DA, we'll work with the Freedom Front, we work with all parties except ANC and EFF. We have been very clear about that and MK because of our ideology. We are too far apart in our values. And we have been consistent. We haven't collapsed any government. You know, smaller parties are problems, but I'm telling you, they are the ones that don't have values, that are there for their own interest. But there are parties that have been like us. We've been there for thirty two years. And there's no…with a clean name, clean slate, our president has a clean name, our public representatives have a clean name, and here we get into coalitions and people are getting a taste of what we are. So there's no such thing as a small party. I think it's about leadership. I think John C. Maxwell said everything rises and falls on leadership. An institution, a business is only as strong as its leader. And one should put competent ethical leaders in power that serve people.Cllr Lance Grootboom (15:52.641)You can change things around. I, we did it with the same staff that the ANC gave us. It's people that were employed over the years by the ANC. We use those same people, provide leadership to them, and you see the delivery. The same people are now there, but they are unable to deliver under the ANC government. That is because the ANC and it's all over it's you can see what's going on. It's not even a secret. Corruption is big time. If your irregular expenditure is sitting at twenty eight billion, that tells you there's a lot of corruption there. So in our city you can see the decay, you can see the instability. And this is my worry. We have to watch the parties that keep the ANC there. Because I always say this, it's very easy to work with the ANC if you're corrupt, because we can see this…what's going on in the country. So political parties that align there, accept that type of environment. And that's why we have these problems. Because I haven't seen any coalition government where the ANC is together succeeding in the country. You've seen the reports from the Auditor General. They are all collapsing. But you have seen some parties that work together and you see the resemblance, it's strong…So yes, they are political parties saying it's the small parties that are the problem. They must single out these parties to say, we're the ones that keep bringing ANC back and collapsing municipalities. And they have to look at the ones that have been consistent. The good thing about the ACDP is we haven't been around for years. It's not a new party. It's thirty-two years. The problem is we've never got the mandate. Your wards have been controlled by two parties in South Africa. Two parties have controlled it for the last thirty years. So the way our wards look, people must now really look and say, you haven't given us an opportunity. And that was my campaign message here. I said, guys, you can't blame me if your ward is not functioning. Give us one ward, we'll show you a blueprint of what it looks like. And then you can judge us. But you can't vote every time the same and hope for change. How does that work? It's insanity. You get five years for a reason to evaluate if whoever you put into power delivered.Cllr Lance Grootboom (18:17.977)If he didn't deliver, you have now the opportunity to determine if I'm going to vote for this person or not. But some of our people just go out, they like slogans, they like rhetoric, they love these things, but their lives are not improving. We showed them in a short space of time what it can be done. But I'm gonna say this because we're a Christian party. As long as Joseph was with Pharaoh, Egypt prospered. As long as Daniel was with Nebuchadnezzar, Babylon prospered. As long as Esther was with the King, she could preserve the community, the nation. So I've seen when the righteous are in power, and the righteous is just a simple term for ethical, ethical leaders like we understand in the business world. So when the righteous are in power the people rejoice. When ethical leaders are at the helm, people will rejoice. But when unethical leaders are in charge, people will moan. And there's a lot of moaning happening across South Africa. Everything is collapsing. All that they should see is who's in power. And then they will know why they are moaning. So it means we haven't sent the righteous into power. And the church doesn't do a good job themselves. Because we haven't sent competent, God fearing leaders in, and we haven't supported those ones that are there.And that has been our big problem. We should really look at this thing. I mean, good companies if you look around. Competent CEOs that have changed a lot of companies. These were leaders that understood what they're supposed to do. They were competent, ethical, and they built big companies that you can look at today. Because the boards made some changes, they appointed strong people. We are asking our shareholders in Nelson Mandela Bay. If you want to elect the board, elect a good board so that we can appoint a good CEO, a city manager, executive directors that have the same values as us and that can deliver services. And at the same time, it's leadership, like I said. We can go back and work with the same officials. We'll still deliver because of leadership. And that's important to me. This thing in Nelson Mandela Bay is a leadership issue.Cllr Lance Grootboom (20:43.181)It has always been a leadership. There are good systems in place. Sometimes we don't even need to change some of them. We just need leaders there that can hold people accountable, that's competent, capable…We mustn't be afraid to use the private sector to come in. You know, if we can't get the skill inside, we should go to the companies that have been working. And that is my view. You want to get the best and if you have the best, you will see what will happen. And I think that's how we're gonna change Nelson Mandela Bay with competent ethical leaders at the helm that can provide stability. They don't serve their political party, they serve the people who have put them there. And they love the people. They love the city. That is what a public servant should be, and that is what an ethical leader is. He's not there to hold an office. He's there to serve his term with distinction, but building for the future of his children. Because Chris, to be honest with you, what can you do? There's not a lot to build in five years. And politicians keep their position for five years. So if you look at companies, they have a vision beyond five years. But every five years we have new people coming in and everybody just wants to hold this position. I said to my team of our residents, we are not building for five years. We're building for the future of our children. We want to build a legacy here where our kids are proud. They don't need to leave Nelson Mandela Bay. They can stay here because there will be an environment where businesses will grow and investors will come in. We will retain investment. We will attract investment and we will build a city where everybody, no matter what the colour of your skin is, will be proud. We won't separate nobody. Not even by faith. We will serve everyone with distinction here.And that's gonna take leaders that love people and the city. And that's what ACDP has been offering for the last thirty two years, yet the church and residents have missed it.Chris Steyn (22:52.12)Thank you, that was Councillor Lance Grootboom of the ACDP speaking to BizNews. I am Chris Steyn..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. 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