A frustrated rural community has turned to criminal means trying to focus their municipality’s attention on their needs.
Residents of Elalini village, about 20km outside Ugie in the Elundini local municipality, saying they have been forgotten by those in power, have now seized the municipality’s TLB, vowing to hold it until the road is properly regravelled.
“We are fed up. The mayor can send police if she wants, but we won’t release the TLB until the job is done,” they said.
The residents said Elalini’s roads were well maintained when the village fell under the KSD local municipality, but everything changed when it was moved to Elundini through a demarcation process.
They want a collapsed access road repaired after years of inaction from local authorities.
The badly damaged road connects them to schools, clinics and essential services in Ugie, but they say the municipality has repeatedly ignored their pleas for help.
Recently, villagers raised more than R20,000 to hire machinery and fix the road themselves after sections had turned into deep dongas.
Resident Dumisani Mpuku said the municipality, embarrassed by the initiative, later sent its own TLB to blade the road — but the gesture left it in worse condition.
“We want the road to be properly gravelled.
“If heavy rains come, cars will just get stuck in the mud,” Mpuku said.
Residents said the road was last repaired in the 1990s.
The village has no access to clean drinking water, despite boreholes being drilled nearly a decade ago.
“Not a single drop of water has come from those taps,” one resident said.
Locals share water from natural ponds with animals.
Elderly resident Nowethu Ngeni said the state of the road had cost lives.
“My own mother passed away while we waited hours for an ambulance.
“People use stepladders as stretchers to carry the sick for more than 5km,” she said.
She recalled having to borrow a horse from a neighbour to rush her sick brother to an ambulance waiting outside the village.
Children walk long distances to reach schools in other wards, as transport cannot use the damaged road.
Resident Mlungisi Hlwathika said many villagers were pensioners who could not afford to raise funds.
“Our own government has forsaken us. Floods have destroyed our homes, but we have never received help,” he said.
They accused their ward councillor of channelling relief and roadwork projects to the neighbouring Ncembu village, which is where he lives, while ignoring Elalini.
Elundini mayor Mamello Leteba said the municipality was aware of the problem but limited funding prevented them from addressing all roads on the same budget.
“We cannot do all the roads at once with the scarce resources we have,” she said. “This financial year, we’re doing a road in Emaweni.
“We don’t have the budget to do Elalini’s road for now.”
She said about R40m had been allocated from the Municipal Infrastructure Grant for road projects across the municipality.
Daily Dispatch
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