Taking R61,000 from his savings, retired Mount Fletcher police station commander Mthetheleli Damane paid to have a borehole sunk in his backyard.
He hit good water and now supplies three villages in the Matatiele area.
He is the go-to guy for the parched villages of Lugada, Xeni and Caba.
Almost every day since 2022 — especially in the dry season — Damane has woken up at 5am and carts thousands of litres of water to hundreds of homesteads which don’t have piped water.
A number of his clients are elderly people who don’t have the physical strength to trek to rivers and streams to fetch water.
He can pump 20,000l of clean water a day from his 61m-deep borehole, which has yet to run out of water.
He charges R300 per 1,500l — the carrying capacity of his tank for the Lugada villagers, which is a generous five litres per rand.
The price must go up for villages further away, but it’s still a good deal at R600, still 2.5-litres to the rand.
He also carts the water on his Nissan bakkie.
He said he believed the 1,500l could last for about month.
He grew up in the same village and his family fetched water from the local streams.
He understands the plight of sharing drinking water with animals.
Unemployed Vuyelwa Bhambula, 59, cannot afford to buy water and will get it from the river even at midnight.
“We don’t sleep until we make sure we have water,” Bhambula said.
And at midnight, there are others. People will camp on the river bank as they await their turn.
Lugada has never had a reliable water supply. Taps are dry and water tanks provided by the local municipality are dry or damaged.
“A few years ago the municipality provided us with water tanks. They were supposed to bring water. That never happened. Until now we are still waiting.”
Bhambula said she’d had enough. Her body was tired and stressed.
Damane, who lives in the mountains, said his service was in demand in other neighbouring villages, whose residents called him to bring water, but he did not want to overstretch himself because of his limited resources.
The Dispatch took a sip of his borehole water. It tasted like the bottled water one buys in supermarkets.
On average, he serves about 15 households a week, but in summer business booms to about 40 households, starting at dawn and ending at 9pm.
Damane said he allowed pensioners without money to pay later when they received their grants.
“The elderly people are easy to work with and they are happy with my service.”
He also uses the water for his family’s benefit and his vegetable garden.
Damane says his low-cost initiative might be a solution for the Eastern Cape government which faces a water crisis where 1.4-million people don’t have access to clean tap water.
“There is a solution to the water problem in the Eastern Cape.
“If the municipalities can do boreholes in these villages and calculate how many households will benefit from each borehole, maybe 200 households for a start, it can provide reliable water to people.”
“Now it’s hard for people because water is scarce. This is a viable solution.”
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