South Africa: Phone Chaos At Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality Drags On Into Second Month

By Estelle Ellis

Despite promises from outgoing acting city manager Ted Pillay, the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality's phone lines and call centre remained down this week -- leaving residents unable to report service delivery failures for more than a month.

The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality's call centre and office lines remained offline on Thursday due to a billing dispute with mobile network operator MTN.

The MMC for corporate services, Khusta Jack, from the Abantu Integrity Movement, said on Thursday evening that he believed the lines would be restored in the next "36 hours, all things being equal".

The phone lines have been out of service for a month. Nelson Mandela Bay has three call centres, including two for electricity and water that were seemingly established without permission from the council, it was said in a city council meeting last month. The third call centre, the "official" call centre, dropped close to 4,000 calls a year before this outage.

To compound the issue, the metro is switching from Vodacom to Telkom for officials' cellphones. This means that officials now have different cellphone numbers, which were not distributed to city councillors.

As a result, members of the public can't complain about services not being delivered,...

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