It used to be the weather that decided whether you went for a swim. Now it’s a bacteria count.
In Buffalo City — an ANC-run municipality covering East London, Bhisho (formerly Bisho), and Qonce (formerly King William’s Town) — beaches are now subject to regular shutdowns.
Not due to rough seas. Not due to shark sightings. But due to raw sewage flowing into rivers and oceans.
Nahoon Beach, once one of East London’s most prized coastal spaces, is now caught in a cycle of openings and closures — shut one day, reopened the next — all due to what feels like an endless stream of pollution spills.
The municipality, as always, deflects. It blames the public. It blames ageing infrastructure. It blames everything but itself. No mention of mismanagement. No admission of neglect.
And in one of its more surreal moments, it once claimed — without a shred of irony — that water quality samples were “coming down positively.”
And this isn’t a one-off incident. It’s a layered failure: informal settlements with no sanitation dumping waste into rivers; unmaintained stormwater drains unable to handle even moderate rains; invasive species clogging estuaries; ageing, overcapacity pump stations that frequently fail; and wastewater treatment plants that simply do not work. E
very crack in the system feeds the next — until the ocean itself becomes a final dumping ground.
When the sea is polluted, the collapse isn’t just environmental — it’s economic. Residents who pay steep municipal rates to live near what was once a premium beach now watch their investments decay. Tourists stay away. Neighbourhoods empty out. Local economies suffer. And the city grows poorer.
This isn’t unique to Buffalo City. Beaches in municipalities across the country have fallen into the same trap — closed, reopened, polluted, then closed again. uMhlanga in eThekwini. Ramsgate in Ugu District. Knysna Lagoon. Herold’s Bay in George. Strand in the City of Cape Town.
All once-premium locations. All now subject to seemingly regular warnings, closures, and the kind of contamination that should be unthinkable in a functioning country.
And behind all of it is a broken system of local governance. Monthly rates aren’t used to maintain cities — they’re used to pay salaries.
Councillors, cadres, and so-called “professional” staff see municipalities not as service providers, but as job dispensaries. Competence is optional. Accountability, non-existent.
Maintenance is outsourced — often at inflated costs — to freshly registered companies, to tenderpreneurs who chase any tender that pays, to large corporates that tick the right BEE boxes but not the right technical ones, to friends, to friends of friends, to conveniently distant family members. The work is seldom done properly — if at all. And no one gets fired.
Infrastructure collapses slowly, then suddenly, until it becomes someone else’s problem.
And when that happens — when the pipes burst, the pumps fail, or the beach closes — provincial or national government steps in with the usual headlines: “intervention,” “administration,” “task teams.” But the cycle doesn’t break. It just deepens.
Because the failure isn’t incidental. It’s baked in.
And so, beaches close. And reopen. And close again.
And South Africans keep asking the question no one should ever have to ask:
Is it safe to swim?
Has the sewage cleared yet?
And what exactly am I paying for?
