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For many school children and working residents of ward 6 of Balasi in Flagstaff in the Eastern Cape, rainy days mean they have to struggle to get to school and work. The reason for this is that the road from their village to the nearest access road with public transport usually gets muddy and hard to navigate when heavy rains set.
It is a problem that one resident took to the Flagstaff Paralegal Advice Centre, a community-based organisation (CBO) supported in its community work through the Strengthening Action Against Corruption (SAAC) project. Centre co-ordinator Bomkazi Mhlongo says the struggles of the residents do not seem to be prioritised by the Ngquza Hill Local Municipality, under which the village falls.
“The member of the community came to the centre in January 2025 after having attended a community meeting we organised in December of the previous year. They wanted help in getting the municipality to respond to the community’s challenges,” Mhlongo explains.
The road had been in a bad condition for a long time and, although other roads in the area have received attention from the municipality, some work had begun on this one, but it was not completed. Mhlongo then organised through the office of the council speaker for the ward councillor to make an official address to the community. The explanation from the councillor was that the failure to complete the grading of the road was due to equipment of the municipality getting damaged in the middle of the project, in 2024.
“We were told that the project had not been put out to tender, and that the municipality had used its own equipment to see to the fixing of the road, but when that equipment broke, it was the end of the project.”
As a result, some of the road is graded and a portion of it is not. The ward councillor was also not able to clarify when municipal workers would return to complete the work they had started.
A quick look at the municipality’s annual report – in which the status of projects including roads are recorded for the year 2024/25 – shows no progress update for the Balasi road. The report does, however, detail the progress reports on other roads, including Holy Cross Road that runs through the town of Flagstaff.
Mhlongo says follow up enquiries by her office have gone unanswered. She does believe that the community stands a chance to get the answers they need if they stand together.
“The unfinished road is an inconvenience to many people in the area. Even taxis do not go past the ungraded portion as it is not safe to drive on. That means people have to walk long distances to get to the nearest accessible road to get taxis.”
She acknowledges that there are several community organisations in the area that could rally enough support on the ground for a peaceful march to the municipal offices. “I do think that collaboration among the different organisations would help put the correct amount of pressure on the municipality.”
“The thing is, things cannot stay like this. We need to make sure that the road get fixed so that the homes at the top of the hill in the area are just as accessible as the ones on the bottom of it,” says Mhlongo, adding that in cases of emergencies, ambulances and police vehicles would not be able to drive up the hill to administer help to residents.
The SAAC project was launched in 2024 and brings together Corruption Watch and the Social Change Assistance Trust as coordinating and implementing partners respectively, to support over 10 CBOs across the Eastern Cape in campaigns advocating for accountability from local government.
The CBOs are trained and capacitated to use practical mechanisms to hold their different municipalities accountable for service delivery in their areas. The aim is to promote transparency in service delivery so that communities are able to detect and report corruption when it is suspected.
Transparency International is also part of the project and has conducted a corruption risk assessment across the areas in which the CBOs operate. The results of this will be made public later this year.
