The eThekwini Metropolitan Municipality has lost its bid to appeal a court order over raw sewage spills in the city. A full bench of the Pietermaritzburg High Court ruled on 30 September that the city had no reasonable prospects of success.
The original order, handed down in December 2025, requires the city to obey legal directives on untreated sewage leaks. It must also publish weekly E. coli readings for its swimming beaches and draw up a plan to fix failing wastewater treatment plants.
“The irony is the municipality has spent millions on lawyers, instead of fixing the water problems,” said Dean Macpherson, the DA’s KwaZulu-Natal chair and Minister of Public Works and Infrastructure.
Municipal spokesperson Senzelwe Mzila said the city had been complying with the December judgment. He said it had “only been appealing certain aspects of it”.
Mzila said eThekwini was still studying the new judgment. He said the city already publishes E. coli readings for beach water on its website.
Macpherson said the decision to appeal showed that the municipality was not complying with the order.
The full bench included Judge President Thoba Poyo-Dlwati. The city had argued that the first court did not consider whether it took reasonable steps to obey the directives. The DA argued that the directives were clear legal orders with time frames, so the city either complied or did not.
According to the report, even eThekwini’s own lawyers admitted the city had not complied. The court found it was “axiomatic” that the city had not taken reasonable steps to deal with water quality problems.
“The failure of the applicant to take reasonable steps to safeguard water resources, public rivers, beaches, and residents’ homes are issues that have affected the citizenry for many years and do not require further investigation,” the judgment said.
The court also found that eThekwini had admitted it did not hold water use licences for some of its treatment works.
The city blamed some of the damage on the April 2022 floods and on vandalism. The judgment said many of the problems started long before the floods and had lasted five to seven years.
eThekwini also said its systems were built for a much smaller population. It said that after its boundaries grew in 2000, it had to serve about four million people with outdated systems.
The court rejected the city’s claim that money problems stopped it from obeying the directives. It said eThekwini gave no budget figures to support that defence.
The case began when the DA, and ActionSA in a separate application, went to court. They wanted the city forced to obey directives issued in 2021 and 2022 by two KwaZulu-Natal departments. The directives ordered the city to stop raw sewage spills into rivers and homes.
The DA said in court papers that the spills posed a health risk to residents. It said they could also harm tourism and business growth in the city.
In December 2025, the high court found that eThekwini had broken several environmental and water laws. It also found the city breached Section 24 of the Constitution, which protects the right to an environment that is not harmful to health. Local government elections are due in November.
Source: this article is based on reporting by Moneyweb. Image: Moneyweb. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Business desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Anelisa Nkuna covers business and money news for Tzaneen Voice. Anelisa reports on the rand, fuel prices, interest rates, jobs, Eskom, Transnet, farming and company results. The aim is simple: explain what the numbers mean for household budgets, small businesses and workers in South Africa.