Staff Reporter
Business flight from North West’s Ditsobotla Local Municipality is fast approaching unless government moves faster to halt the municipality’s collapse and restore basic services under a national intervention.
This is according to the Select Committee on Cooperative Governance and Public Administration, whose chairman, Mxolisi Kaunda, said on Friday that service delivery in the embattled municipality remains “largely non-existent”.
“The risk of business flight is both real and imminent,” said Kaunda.
He said the municipality must “strengthen its relationship with ratepayers and the business community to improve revenue collection”.
“Businesses must be encouraged to meet their obligations, but this is contingent on the municipality demonstrating consistent improvements in service delivery.”
The committee said weak and allegedly corrupt officials were eroding the municipality’s functioning and draining resources from service delivery. It called for stricter accountability.
The committee said it would urgently engage Cooperative Governance Minister Velenkosini Hlabisa to ensure more national departments actively back the Section 139(7) intervention.
Concerns have been raised that support has largely come from National Treasury and national Cogta.
Kaunda said there had been some administrative progress, which included more stable political leadership and a better functioning council structure. But, he added, residents were still not seeing reliable water, sanitation, refuse removal, electricity or road maintenance.
The municipality, which includes Lichtenburg and Coligny in North West’s Ngaka Modiri Molema district, serves about 164,176 people, has swiftly been losing economic ground.
Its own 2024/25 annual report says businesses have been moving out of the Lichtenburg area and jobs have been lost in the process.
Parliament recommended its dissolution in October 2022 after finding evidence of financial mismanagement, poor governance and service delivery collapse.
Cabinet later placed Ditsobotla under national intervention in September 2025, with the Cogta saying the municipality had adopted unfunded budgets for five straight years.
It had also accumulated more than R1.6 billion in unpaid creditors, defaulted on salary and Eskom payments, and failed to carry out court-ordered recovery steps.
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