Someone remarked as politicians scrambled to do damage control over the Joburg water shortages and resultant protests this week, that, well, in rural Limpopo, we don’t protest over being without water for a few days. That is because we just don’t know what it’s like to have a regular, reliable supply of clean drinking water.
In Limpopo’s rural villages, being waterless has become so normalised that people actually seem to have accepted it’s just how life should be – spending hours a day queuing for hours to fill up just one 200-litre drum with water.
Most rural-based folk spend the better part of their days either searching for or standing in long queues to draw water from communal taps that only dispense the sacred liquid occasionally, or at worst, drawing water from wells and streams where animals also quench their thirst or take a dip to cool down.
In my village, a tanker from the Polokwane Local Municipality delivers water to households, limited to four 200-litre drums per household, once a week and sometimes once every two weeks, depending on the water delivery man’s mood or his employers’.
On such a day, residents line up containers at their gates and wait, and wait for the tanker to roll in and deposit a few hundred litres for each household.
Elderly citizens and children then spend hours transferring the water from the drums into other containers in the home after such a delivery. It’s a ‘normal’ way of life. Most are indigent households that can hardly feed themselves and cannot afford the steep prices charged by private waterpreneurs.
Those who have the means buy from waterpreneurs. These are private citizens who have found a way of making money from this misery.
They make roaring business from water drawn from either boreholes on their properties or from free municipal water drawn from a water treatment plant 11km away.
They fill up the tanks on the back of their trucks and lorries and resell to water starved households at prices ranging from R430 per 1500-litre tank.
The communal water taps located at some street corners, sometimes out of the blue, cough up water. And for a few hours, there’s a scramble as people rush to fill up.
They line up near the taps with sgubhus, buckets, and all sorts of other containers. Some arrive on donkey-drawn carts laden with containers big and small, others in bakkies.
Nobody knows when or for how long the taps will run, hence there’s much tension and sometimes quarrels break out during the waiting. After the long wait, often under the broiling Limpopo sun, follows the indignity of struggling up dusty, rocky roads pushing wheelbarrows carrying sgubhus.
Water being a basic human right, one would have thought its provision to communities would be a top priority of the government led by the oldest liberation movement.
One would have expected that liberating citizens from the indignity of getting water from sources where animals also drink and bathe would be an absolute priority.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-05-21-waterless-during-the-covid-19-pandemic
It’s been 30 years since the end of legislated apartheid and the ushering in of democracy. It is an undeniable fact that some of the structural and developmental issues caused by more than a century of racially segregated rule and underdevelopment still exist.
But that can’t continue to be an excuse. It is reported that corruption in the country resulted in the loss of over R437 billion. With the looting of so much money that would have made a world of difference to the lives of millions of water starved citizens, one would have expected to see sustained operations to arrest and prosecute those responsible and to recover the looted funds. This looting, too, has become a ‘normal’ way of life.
Billions have been spent on water projects, but due to corruption and mismanagement, many of these were never completed. Broken water pipes at what used to be construction sites for these projects stand as poignant monuments to this rot.
In Giyani, the municipality spent R3,3 billion on a water project over a period of seven years. Still, residents remain without water. In 2021, during a government imbizo, municipal officials shamelessly told then Minister of Water Affairs, Senzo Mchunu, they needed a further R1,1 billion to finish the project.
The taps remain dry in Giyani and its 91 villages. In some villages, trenches left gaping years ago for the purpose of installing water pipes remain as a stark reminder of a dream deferred. In the town, almost every household has invested in jojo tanks, and some have boreholes.
The project has been the subject of a Special Investigating Unit (SIU) investigation for a while, and some officials have already appeared in court. Hopefully, this will yield results that may, in the end, see water flowing endlessly from the taps in Giyani.
As a result of a government failing to provide its citizens with the basic human right, residents weary of protesting and complaining have decided to do it themselves.
But to those who have no means to pay for a borehole or a water tank or to buy water from waterpreneurs, the only choice remains to endure the daily indignity of queuing, waiting and waiting…
The government executives, who live in gated staff villages with an endless supply of water and other comforts paid for by the taxpayer, seem in no rush to save millions of residents from this daily suffering.
It appears to them that this indignity should be accepted as a normal way of life that should be tolerated by the electorate. Interestingly, most, if not all, of the politicians in these high positions of government originate from some of these very villages.
One would expect that since they have lived through the pain and suffering of not having a regular supply of clean drinking water and spent hours searching for water like millions of residents still do today, they would prioritise and escalate efforts to reverse this situation.
Perhaps therein also lies the problem, because having grown up in such deprived areas, they too perhaps have accepted this humiliation as a normal way of life for black people!
If that were not so, the water challenges would have been addressed with the same urgency and drive they display when organising lavish events paid for by the taxpayer.
It’s such a pity that this suffering is not only limited to Limpopo, but it’s a daily struggle faced by rural folk all over the country, from Njhakanjhaka to Umbumbulu, from Lusikisiki to Kgomo-Kgomo. Even more worrying, though, is that there is no sign this suffering will end anytime soon.
Even elderly citizens who had high hopes that things would change when they voted for democratic change in April 1994 seem to have lost all hope. In May 2024, on the 30th anniversary of the installation of Nelson Mandela as the country’s first democratic government, 83-year-old Ramadimetja Selema of Marulaneng, a village in the Nkumpi-Lepelle municipality, expressed frustration over the water issues.
She pointed at the 200l containers lined up against the fence waiting to be filled up. She spent R240 of the R2 280 monthly old age pension to buy water at least twice a month.
“I’m old now, and I still don’t know what it is like to have clean running water in my home. I have spent my whole life struggling to get water,” she told me in a resigned voice.
Perhaps the politicians will up their game, abandon the talk and act decisively, now that the water shortages have reached the richest city on the African continent, Johannesburg, and the middle class and people of other races who have never gotten used to going a few hours without water, are now beginning to feel the daily suffering endured by millions of citizens in rural areas. – news@mukurukuru.co.za
He writes on issues of social justice, rural development, human rights, arts, culture and heritage.
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