The Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality workers’ strike that has
been taking place over the past week, has been called off, Nelson Mandela Bay mayor,
Nqaba Bhanga, announced today.
Following the court order granted by the Labour Court of
South Africa, Port Elizabeth on Friday, all municipal essential service workers
have been compelled to go back to work.
“As the NMBM, we would like to apologise to our residents
for the inconvenience caused by the recent illegal strike action by some of our
employees,” Bhanga said.
“The strike admittedly disrupted service delivery and saw
some of our residents without water and power due to sabotage that was done to
our infrastructure systems by some of our very own employees.,” he explained.
“We are pleased to inform the residents that the situation
is under control following the tireless work by the City in ensuring that
systems go back to normal. The court order will ensure that we continue with
our good work of taking services to our people as our mandate stipulates.”
Bhanga also mentioned that as a metro, they condemn the acts
of violence that were displayed last week, that included intimidation against
staff members and the tampering of infrastructure that inconvenienced many
residents.
“We would like to thank our residents for their patience
during this time and appreciate the cooperation you displayed when we
communicated alternative systems to alleviate the disruption,” Bhanga said.
“We are committed to service delivery and as such, have put in
place a strategy to deal with the backlog in service delivery that was caused
by the industrial strike action. As we always do, we would like to urge our
residents to work with us to ensure that we restore all services to normality
within a short space of time. We remain committed in working towards one City,
one future.”
Issued by the Nelson Mandela Bay Communications Office
