Buffalo City residents are
still waiting
for service delivery.

Buffalo City covers East London, Mdantsane and King William's Town , the smallest of South Africa's eight metros by population. Residents and businesses face persistent service-delivery challenges that shape daily life, disrupt economic activity and steadily erode confidence in the local state. Prolonged water and electricity outages, slow repairs to damaged infrastructure, deteriorating roads and stormwater systems, uneven refuse collection and sluggish response times to service requests are all routine. Oversight bodies point to ageing infrastructure, budget constraints, skills shortages and governance failures as the underlying drivers. Compounding the problem, residents struggle to log faults, get updates on open cases or track the progress of repairs, and communication during interruptions is inconsistent , leaving households and businesses in the dark about when services will actually come back on.