The following speech was delivered by DA KwaDukuza Mayoral Candidate, Privi Makhan at the announcement of DA KwaDukuza Ward Councillors and Manifesto Launch.
Find pictures here: Privi Makhan and KwaDukuza-Ward-Councillor-Candidates and Get KwaDukuza Working Manifesto
Residents of KwaDukuza, provincial leadership, stakeholders and candidates, thank you for being here.
Today is not simply the launch of a document. It is the launch of a contract. A contract between our DA team that wants to govern this municipality and you, the people of KwaDukuza.
I have said before: This municipality is not a case study to me.
I am a third-generation daughter of this soil.
These streets shaped me.
These beaches were part of my childhood.
The sugar-cane fields, the town centres, the villages, the suburbs and the people of this municipality are part of who I am.
So, when I say that KwaDukuza is not working as it should, I do not say it from a distance.
I say it because I live the consequences with you. And when somewhere that you call home doesn’t work, you don’t have the luxury of looking away.
The DA’s national promise in this election is simple: Get municipalities working for all. Today we make that promise local. We say: Get KwaDukuza Working.
And our plan has six promises.
Our first promise is a professional, corruption-free municipality that works for the people, not politicians.
What does that mean?
It firstly means that cadre deployment must end. It means jobs in the municipality must go to competent people based on merit, not connected people based on the card of a political party. It means a tender must be won because a company can do the work, not because somebody knows somebody. It means when an official fails, there must be real consequences. And it means when you report a problem, the municipality must behave as though your time and your money matter.
Look at where we are today. KwaDukuza has spent 2026 dealing with instability at the very top of the administration. The Municipal Manager remains suspended following a Section 106 process. We have had acting arrangements and public disputes around who is lawfully in charge. We had 2 other senior managers on suspension, the one who was a blatant political deployee, an appointment that we as the DA had rejected from the onset. The very same environment has had to confront the R35,7 million cyber-heist, procurement controversies and serious questions about project monitoring. The latest audit may be financially unqualified, but reporting on it still raised more than R100 million in irregular expenditure.
That is not the standard we should accept.
Where the DA governs, there is another model. The DA manifesto points to municipalities such as West Coast District with 14 consecutive clean audits and full capital-project expenditure, and to top-performing municipalities such as Swartland, Saldanha Bay, Hessequa, Kouga and Midvaal. Good government is not magic. It is management, discipline, competence and consequences. But it’s also political stability. I won’t go into detail about the political musical chairs that residents had to endure in this term.
So, in KwaDukuza, our team will publish major contracts and project milestones. We will publish a public tracking dashboard for all capital projects. We will strengthen internal audit and, most importantly, implement consequence management. We will protect municipal payment systems against fraud and cybercrime and ghost employees. We will make EPWP and municipal opportunity programmes transparent and auditable. Public money will be for public good, not political patronage.
Our second promise is reliable electricity.
This promise needs very little explanation to a business owner in the CBD who has lost stock during an outage, or a Grade 12 learner in Ntshawini who is trying to study in the dark. Electricity is not just another service. It is the bloodstream of the local economy.
KwaDukuza has experienced a level of electricity instability that has become completely normalised. In 2025 I highlighted that 81 of the first 100 days of a mayoral term had included outages. As at the end of June 2026, energy losses were reported at R441 million. Think about that, over 1,2 million rand a day being lost. That is money disappearing while paying residents are asked to carry more of the burden.
The DA has shown elsewhere that municipalities can take energy resilience seriously. Cape Town has used renewable-energy partnerships to protect city-supply customers from up to two stages of load-shedding, while DA governments invest in maintenance, private generation and better energy management.
Here in KwaDukuza, we will ringfence electricity revenue for the grid as far as the law and finances allow. We will accelerate smart meters and power user audits. We will target cable theft, illegal connections and large-scale electricity theft. And we will fast-track the integration of independent power producers into the energy supply environment. Central to stabilising the grid and unlocking stalled projects such as the 240 million rand Dukuza substation, the first order of business must be to explore funding options to get this project up and running. When the grid stabilises, businesses will surely arrive here. Our goal is simple: fewer outages, faster repairs, lower losses and a grid that business can trust.
Our third promise is basic services that work — and real accountability for water.
I want to be very clear about this because honest government starts with honest promises. KwaDukuza Local Municipality is not the Water Services Authority. That responsibility belongs to iLembe District Municipality. I will not stand here and promise powers that the mayor of KwaDukuza does not have.
But we also simply can’t accept a system where a resident is sent from one government office to another while water runs down the street or sewage comes out of a manhole.
I was in Warren Road in Ward 17 the other day. An 81-year-old resident described to me how the water tanker only comes once every two days when there is a water outage. I was still alarmed that she had accepted water from a tanker as normal. What happened to a municipality delivering reliable, reticulated supply? Millions of litres of clean water leaking into the streets, slow response times, blocked manholes and sewage overflow, these are not uncommon stories. Let’s be honest, residents don’t really care which logo is on the bakkie. They just want the problem fixed.
So, we will create a formal KwaDukuza–iLembe escalation protocol, publish response standards and show residents who owns each fault and what is being done. And for the services KwaDukuza directly controls — roads, stormwater, streetlights, refuse and public facilities — we will have ward-based maintenance plans and public repair schedules.
Where the DA governs, the results on water show what disciplined infrastructure management can do. The DA manifesto records the Western Cape as having the highest level of basic water access, while Cape Town, Overstrand, Midvaal and Swartland all achieved No Drop scores of 90% or more in the 2023 report.
Our promise is this: if a service is ours, we will fix it. If it belongs to another sphere, we will fight for the resident until it is fixed.
Our fourth promise is safer communities.
A municipality cannot replace SAPS. But a municipality can make crime harder. We can make sure streetlights work. We can maintain verges, so criminals do not have cover. We can use CCTV intelligently. We can enforce by-laws. We can support neighbourhood watches and CPFs. We can coordinate municipal law enforcement, SAPS and private security instead of allowing everyone to work in separate silos.
On Workers Day this year, I spent my morning engaging the commuters of KwaDukuza about the things that matter the most to them. The harrowing stories of young women having to walk in fear of being mugged or raped, all because public lighting has remained off in some areas for over 2 years. How have we allowed this to be normalised, that havens of criminality have been allowed to thrive in our communities due to ineptitude?
The DA’s record elsewhere gives us practical models. The LEAP programme in Cape Town has deployed around 1,400 officers to hotspots and made tens of thousands of arrests. Kouga has a 24-hour joint operations centre that connects local services, SAPS and private security. In the Stellenbosch municipality, a municipal court has been established to deal with by-law transgressions.
In KwaDukuza, we will install strategic CCTV monitoring, prioritise dark and danger routes, support community patrol structures and, most importantly, establish a 24-hour community safety unit, not a unit that goes off duty at 10pm. Crime doesn’t sleep. Safety will become part of how we design and maintain every public space.
Our fifth promise is a clean KwaDukuza.
This municipality should never have to debate whether dirty streets are normal. Cleanliness is not cosmetic. It is health. It is tourism. It is investment. It is dignity.
And the municipality’s own annual report admits the seriousness of the problem. It identifies illegal dumping and littering as a major challenge in communities along the R102 corridor, including Darnall and Zamani, Gledhow, Ntshawini, Groutville, Charlottedale, eThembeni, eTete, Shakaskraal and Shakashead.
We see the result in illegal dumps, dirty verges, polluted streams and public spaces that are cleaned for an event and then neglected again.
The DA manifesto proposes a different operating model: proper refuse fleet maintenance, stronger environmental-health enforcement, recycling facilities and partnerships with communities. We will also ensure that the Adopt a Facility model will be formalised to allow for public-private partnerships. The ownership of public spaces must be a whole-of-society approach.
We will also create a rapid illegal-dumping response and enforcement team. We will maintain parks, beaches, sports facilities and verges to a schedule residents can see. KwaDukuza must look like a place that respects its people.
Our sixth promise is jobs, investment and opportunity.
Local government cannot employ everyone. But local government can either open the door to opportunity or stand in the doorway.
KwaDukuza has extraordinary advantages: the N2 corridor, the R102, tourism, a growing Ballito economy, logistics access, agriculture, new development and communities hungry for opportunity. Yet we sabotage those advantages when electricity fails, projects stall, approvals take too long and our town centres decline.
The 2022 disaster relief grant is a painful personal example. KwaDukuza received R1.2 billion in disaster funding. That does not mean every rand was wasted — and we must be accurate about that. But with that kind of funding, we should have been able to see tangible improvements across all 30 wards. Yet specific projects have become symbols of failure. At Hulett Bridge, a 29-million-rand project, it’s simply come to a standstill 3 years later, with another 17 million being needed to complete it. The Mnyundwini Bridge, another stalled symbol of the disastrous legacy of the 2022 floods. Every unfinished bridge is not only a construction problem; it is lost access to work, school, customers and investment.
I often tell the story of my good friend Nosi. Her mother was a housekeeper in Salt Rock, and Nosi later went on to take on that role. In 2023, after years of us consistently applying for other jobs for her, she finally got an opportunity to work at a large manufacturing company in KwaDukuza. This was the opportunity she needed to also change her family’s circumstances. In 2025, the manufacturer announced 300 job cuts. Why? Unreliable electricity and red tape. This is not just the story of Nosi, but this is the story of young people of KwaDukuza, who remain locked out of opportunities because government refuses to create an enabling environment for business to thrive.
The DA manifesto shows what an opportunity-focused municipality can do. Cape Town’s Getting YOU to Work initiative has helped more than 24,000 jobseekers travel to interviews and job opportunities. Its title-deed programme has delivered thousands of title deeds to residents, converting housing into real ownership and security.
Our KwaDukuza team will establish a mayoral investment and red-tape unit with clear turnaround times. This will include a dedicated team within the Economic Development department to deal with catalytic projects. We will create a small-business and informal-trader service desk. We will work across all spheres of government to unlock well-located land and support transparent social housing. This must include partnerships with the private sector. Just up the road, a local developer has unlocked a project called Idladla, which provides affordable housing, with dignity, close to economic opportunities. The private sector are not our enemies.
And we will measure growth not only by new buildings and property prices, but by whether the child growing up in Groutville, Shakaskraal, eTete, Darnall or KwaDukuza town has a better chance of finding work and building a life here.
Friends, the difference in this election is not between people who love KwaDukuza and people who do not. Many people love this place. The difference is between a political party that has learned to explain failure and a team that is ready to manage success.
In our first 100 days, we will publish the state of the municipality. We will launch the energy recovery programme. We will publish maintenance schedules and a public capital project tracking dashboard. We will establish the water escalation protocol. We will open up project and procurement information, with the transparency it deserves. We will launch the safety partnership unit. And after 100 days we will return to all 30 wards and report back.
I can’t promise perfection. But I will promise you that I’ll be honest about the problems and I will show up for you. I promise a government that measures what it does, reports what it has not done and acts when people fail.
This is my home. This is my responsibility. And this is collectively our moment to choose a municipality that works.
So let’s get the lights working. Let us get the streets working. Let us get the finances working. Let us get our public spaces working. Let us get opportunity working.
Let’s Get KwaDukuza Working.