WATER CRISIS SPECIAL REPORT | DYING OF THIRST IN DEMOCRACY

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“I beg you, president Ramaphosa, help us get clean water!”

This was the plea from Abongile Cabanga of Lugada village in Matatiele in the Alfred Nzo district, who must cart water daily in her fight for the lives of her mother, four children aged four to 15, and two siblings.

A Daily Dispatch investigation across the province has found that in the time of democracy, drinking water has been denied to hundreds of thousands of people of the Eastern Cape.

After 30 years of post-apartheid liberation, they are still forced to drink from untested streams, as well as stagnant pools and dams along with animals, the Dispatch investigation found.

Survival is being scorched into the minds and bodies of thousands of people with every step they must take for an hour or more every day as they haul water.

It is a life-or-death crisis — and an outrageous violation of people’s constitutional human rights.

But there is a glimmer of hope in this primal catastrophe — Eastern Cape citizens were becoming ever more vocal, said Dr Eileen Carter, provincial manager of the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC).

In fact, many of the complaints reported to the commission are about lack of access to water.

These are the stark facts from Stats SA about the Eastern Cape water crisis:

25,000 households draw their water from streams and rivers;1.4-million people out of 7.3m have no piped drinking water; and More than half a million homes — 578,330 — have no piped drinking water.

Stats SA reports that Nelson Mandela Bay had the most water interruptions at 45.1%, with Buffalo City scoring a surprising 36.3% since its bulk water supply system has remained relatively stable.

There was some progress — the number of households with water being piped into the dwellings increased by 23 percentage points to 79% between 2002 and 2012.But some of those gains were rolled back in the following years, bringing the latest statistic to 67.2%, Stats SA says.

This leaves a third of households — 32.8% — without municipal water, even though Section 27(1) of the constitution guarantees everyone the right to access sufficient water, mandating the state to take reasonable legislative and other measures, within available resources, to progressively realise these rights.

Carter explained that to ensure the right to basic and sufficient water supply and sanitation services, parliament enacted the Water Services Act 108 of 1997 which is aligned with other regional and international human rights instruments.

“The denial of access to water constitutes a violation of human rights.

“This is evident from the high volume of complaints regarding water access, which constitutes a significant portion of all reported issues.

“We take these concerns seriously and investigate accordingly.

“One notable example is our intervention in the Makana municipality, where we subpoenaed the municipality to report on large-scale water concerns affecting the region,” she said.

Complaints involving alleged human rights violations were assessed on their merits and the HRC would then investigate with communities and with stakeholders.

“Our primary goal remains ensuring the protection and promotion of human rights, particularly the right to access sufficient clean water.

“We encourage communities to continue reporting water-related concerns to us.”

The Dispatch team visited six district municipalities where complaints were reported to the SAHRC — Amathole, OR Tambo, Chris Hani, Alfred Nzo, Joe Gqabi and Chris Hani — as well as Buffalo City Metro.

The team found:

Ailing water infrastructure;

Villages that have never had piped water;

Villages that had infrastructure installed but the taps were dry;

Grannies travelling long distances to fetch water from rivers;

Pensioners paying people to fetch water for them;

Villagers waking up as early as 4am to get water before it was dirtied by animals;

In almost Biblical scenes, donkeys being roped in to cart water; and

Villagers with an eye for a quick buck peddling water to a thirsty, captive market.

Some villagers feel defeated and without hope that they will ever taste piped water.Others soldier on in the belief that one day they will get clean water — and their human rights.

Stats SA says 25,969 Eastern Cape people collect water from streams or rivers, 118,951 are supplied by water tankers, 131,254 get it from rain tanks and 20,004 people have to buy water.

In Nqadu, the home village of amaXhosa King Ahlangene Vulikhaya Sigcawu, taps have been dry for three years, said villagers.

Even if villagers wake before dawn to fetch water before the animals arrive, they sometimes have to use hoes to unclog the stream or pool so they can dip their buckets.

As she filled her 20l bucket, villager Nozukile Magafela said: “We get sick from drinking this water. Our children have rashes. This water tastes bad.”

Some villagers said they had enjoyed piped water for about five years and then suddenly it vanished and never came back. Nor were they ever told why.

Gift of the Givers has kept people in Makhanda and Nkanini informal settlements in the Sarah Baartman district alive by carting in water.

The disaster relief organisation travels 100km from Adelaide, where it draws water from its borehole.

In Mantlaneni village in Lusikisiki and Upper Tabase village in Mthatha, in the OR Tambo district municipality, villagers spoke of their not having tap water since the dawn of democracy.

When multimillion-rand water projects failed, sites were abandoned, they said, leaving despair and thirst in the villages of Mqokolweni in Nqanqarhu in the Joe Gqabi district, and Ndakana in the administration area of Ngqamakhwe in the Amathole district.

Nokuthemba Ntaba, from Mqokolweni, said their hopes for an end to the long walk for water were lifted when a water infrastructure project got going in their village.

But the project petered out and the site is now deserted, so the 20l buckets went back onto heads and the walks resumed.

From these buckets, families drink, cook, bathe and water their vegetables.

In Madliki village in Ngqushwa, 67-year-olds Luleka Fikiso and Ntombizanele Mawana walk two hours a day to fetch water from the Tsholomnqa and Ngwevu rivers.

They do the trip at least three times a day, taking about 40 minutes per mission, which includes a treacherous slope.

Their taps ran dry seven years ago, when they were 60, and since then the trek has become increasingly strenuous.

But if they do not do it “no one will have water to drink,” says Fikiso.

Village committee chair Wilson Liwani said the villagers felt so despondent they had stopped discussing the crisis in meetings.

“We have given up hope. We are told whatever is wrong will be fixed, yet today we still have no water,” he said.

“We were happy when we received clean water, but we are back to square one now.”

In Luganda village near Matatiele in the Alfred Nzo district, Thembeka Ndawo fetches water from the Nonkoloxoko stream, which is half a kilometre from her home.

When it runs dry, the walk stretches to 2km to the next available stream.

“If I could see premier [Oscar] Mabuyane I would tell him we need water. We cannot carry on living like this,” Ndawo said.

In the Cobosi administrative area in Ngcobo, in the Chris Hani district, Abulele Sidukwana said municipal water stopped coming out of taps 14 years ago in 2010.

They share the water from the Mgwali river with animals.

“We are getting sick. But we have no other source of water.

“Promises made all down these years are just empty. “We are fed up. We were told during elections that the issue will be fixed,” he said.

And yet, in this scenario, the department of water & sanitation’s Vision 2030 states that improved water and sanitation must be available and accessible to all and that there should be an increase in access to safe water and sanitation.

Public Service Commission chair Prof Somadoda Fikeni said corruption had amplified the government’s failure to implement its post-apartheid social reconstruction and redevelopment programme.

He said: “I think the government has long accepted in the RDP [Reconstruction & Development Programme] review that they have missed out on the goal.

“They will have to recalibrate that. “The RDP review in itself is an admission on its own.

“The issues of corruption worsened the situation.”

Climate change makes the government’s failure to bring clean water to people ever more pressing.

Fikeni said climate change means every department in the government should treat water shortages as a critical issue that their activities should be co-ordinated around.

“This problem is not about to go away any time soon. “It will worsen.”

Eastern Cape premier Oscar Mabuyane said the province had a “huge backlog” in providing people with water

He blamed vandals working for carting networks for sabotaging the system, and admitted to a critical  need for a “thorough investigation”.

“Our people want water. What has been highlighted in these water issues and the challenges we face is vandalism.

“In the past, we [the people] were complaining about load-shedding which was disrupting the engines that are pumping water from rivers into the bulk water infrastructures.

“There is no longer an issue of load-shedding now, but it is vandalism which is easy to assume is linked to the kind of network of those who probably would be doing water carting.

“Because if water was being pumped and reticulated through pipes and taps, there will be no need for water trucks, and people will be out of business.

“I think there is something there that needs to be thoroughly investigated so that we understand this commitment to permanently disrupt this service.

“Water is life. There is no way people could live without water. We are making that very clear to every mayor, that it is a no-no.

“Our people want their lives to be better. We want water to come out of taps.

“We cannot create excuses about it. Where we understand that technically we cannot do anything about it, we must make other alternatives.

“Boreholes and underground water is being explored and all other issues.”

DA shadow minister for cooperative governance & traditional affairs (Cogta), Retief Odendaal, accused the government of “bad management, a lack of planning and often just sheer incompetence”.

He dismissed as “excuses” the argument that district municipalities lacked financial resources to service large geographical areas.

He said preventive and rehabilitative maintenance was not being prioritised.

“This is fast becoming a crisis. Water losses in most municipalities are rampant.

“In some smaller municipalities, water losses are now exceeding the 50% mark.

“The solution to many of our water woes lies in ensuring we appoint qualified engineers, implement proper project management systems and ensure we budget sufficiently for maintenance and repairs.

“All municipalities should also have an up-to-date water services master plan that guides their repairs and maintenance spending.

“It is not rocket science.

“These are just basic engineering principles.”

EFF provincial secretary Simthembile Madikizela said: “It’s extremely shocking that with all promises of interventions by government, the state of district municipalities has moved from bad to worse.

“Municipalities like Amathole report building of reservoirs in each financial year.

“Reservoirs are built in Great Kei, Bedford, Ngqushwa, but all of them aren’t working.

“OR Tambo is suffering, unable to finish projects that would give a boost to the water reserves of the district, like the Ntsonyini Dam.”

He said there was a leadership crisis in government.

“Cogta is not doing enough to rescue municipalities.

“If things remain like this we will have to call for immediate intervention by national government.”

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