Drowning in city’s exorbitant and unprecedented water tariffs

I AM shocked, as is everyone else. I feel I am being priced out of my home.

I am well educated and experienced, yet I cannot survive in the face of 550% water surcharge tariffs.

A monthly water bill of R500/R700, together with sewerage charges, can easily reach R6 000. Unless we choose to live like rats, we will have to find the money somewhere.

Maybe we should rename Cape Town. Rat Hole – some refer to it now as “Ape Town” or even “Crap Town”.

So many have installed massive storage tanks. Others filled them up before the rate rises. This cost them dearly, but their investments will at least partially remove them from the grid. Others now have well points, boreholes, home desalination plants and appliances that convert air into water.

Until now it was the rich subsidising the poor, but the rich have taken themselves out of the picture.

Now the middle class has to deal with these massive water hikes, but they cannot afford them. Many others cannot afford the rents they pay and squat on private property, taking full advantage of a useless, slow, ineffective, expensive court system.

The city has now created a massive dilemma, I said it from the start. They will lose millions (maybe billions, as we do not make in a year what you do in a month). As we save water, the city loses income, just as Mugabe did when he took over the farms.

Yet, like Mugabe, those in control do not worry. Most of his workforce is in South Africa today receiving free water, electricity, land for squatting, schools, clinics and other scarce services, while our own black workers remain unemployed and largely destitute.

To counter this loss, the city is imposing punitive water and other charges in return for thanking the residents for saving so much water.

Does our city, the city we voted for with enthusiasm, now have the right to price its followers out of their family homes while subsidising poorer voters of its opposing political parties.

The rivers and dams up north, the Vaal and Orange, so often flood in summer when we don’t have rain. Surely water pipelines would be the most economical and immediate solution to top up our much smaller dams during our long, dry summers.

The city has failed and most of its voters are disgruntled and fed-up. Facebook is filled with anti-DA rhetoric. We cannot and should not pay these unprecedented tariffs which subsidise the exorbitant salaries of our city bosses.