Water Rights Webinar Series | Provincial intervention in a municipal crisis: Lessons from Makana

Makana is a municipality in crisis. It faces various service delivery, administrative and financial challenges. Water supply across the municipality, and in Makhanda in particular, has been crippled by aging infrastructure and a severe drought. The Eastern Cape provincial government has intervened twice in terms of section 139 of the Constitution, which provides for provincial intervention into local government when a municipality is in crisis. When neither of those interventions resulted in the desired change, community activists approached the Makhanda High Court which ordered the dissolution of the Makana Municipal Council. Unfortunately, Makana is not an outlier but part of a systemic picture of local government collapse across the country.