Restore our water, restore our dignity
AIf we were honest, we’d tell the minister that his discovery about water challenges in Sekhukhune came as a surprise to him only; locals have endured the situation for years.
s President Cyril Ramaphosa spoke hard truths at the beginning of COP28 in Dubai, something we should applaud him for, a different tragedy unfolded here at home.
Water woes struck greater Sekhukhune, Knysna, Polokwane, Giyani, Bryanston, Morningside, Brixton, Alexandra, Diepsloot and parts of Soweto this week.
Water & sanitation minister Senzo Mchunu did what most ministers do: describe the problem. He is concerned that only one in 200 employees in Sekhukhune district municipality had the right qualifications to deal with water, and that more than 200 boreholes are out of order.
When the minister shared his diagnosis, he probably wanted to show he now understood the gravity of the situation, which, by implication, must mean a solution is around the corner. What many need are solutions with time frames for implementation.
Well, not the type of time frames we were given about load-shedding supposedly ending this month. There clearly was no coherent thought process involved before the bright sparks at Luthuli House made those promises.
But how difficult can it be to get water flowing, especially where water is available? It is an indictment that a community is without water because no-one thought that having just one person employed with the necessary skills in water management would lead to disaster.
If we were honest, we’d tell the minister that his discovery about water challenges in Sekhukhune came as a surprise to him only; locals have been enduring the situation for years.
Last year I spent Christmas in Groblersdal, in the Sekhukhune district — without tap water. Awful. That the minister is only now discovering that the small dorpie only has one qualified employee to attend to water issues is revealing.
This weekend, as we headed to Polokwane for a wedding, we did not bother asking if there was a water shortage in Seshego. The situation is so bad you just assume there’s no water and, in the unlikely event that there is, you are pleasantly surprised. And, of course, there was no water.
Water shortages in Polokwane no longer make news. It’s like a simple, normal killing in KwaMashu. Or a break-in in Johannesburg. No-one is interested anymore. We’ve normalised this stuff.
The locals in Polokwane have resigned themselves to a life of water tanks. The water woes initially spawned aquaactivists but, in the sweltering heat of Limpopo, there’s only so many times you could say amandla!, with a fist punching the air, before you faint.
With everything being relative, perhaps it’s a blessing to have dry taps — counterintuitive as that might seem — rather than to have water contaminated by human remains, as residents of Knysna did this week.
Whose body was it? How long had it been in the town reservoir? Were people drinking decomposing body fluids with their tea? What are the general health implications? Will the municipality’s efforts to disinfect its reservoir eradicate all the human particles or will a tiny bit end up in your glass as you try to keep hydrated in the heatwave? It’s a lot to take in, hopefully not literally.
The rest of us in various metros must also wonder if we can trust the water out of our taps. If it tastes strange (I have no clue how dead bodies taste), could it be because the body hasn’t been discovered yet, but is floating in there? Should our reservoirs be checked for bodies each morning, just in case? Is that where we are as a country? That we kill each other is no longer news — just please don’t dump the body in our reservoirs.
Maybe I am being overdramatic, but imagine the horror. In eThekwini, beaches are losing their blue flag status because sewage is flowing into the ocean due to infrastructure damage from the floods, which took place, well, not this year. (No-one is rushing to fix anything.) The spills are polluting the water that some unfortunate person is going to be baptised in, or that someone is going to plunge into in the hope of washing away all their bad luck. (It’s not bad luck at work, though, it’s just that the economy is on its knees because the ports and Eskom aren’t working.)
Kuningi! That’s the latest South African word of the year, meaning “we are going through a lot”. In Tshwane and Mahikeng, they say gogontshi. This is apparently what many of us have been saying online throughout the year.
Look around. There are water woes everywhere. Loadshedding used to be a drama. It once even forced our globetrotting president to cut short a jaunt to Egypt and rush home. These days he leaves in the middle of stage 6 because it has become normal. But water is not just life, it’s dignity. People’s homes are stinking.
Our president can speak good English at COP28 in Dubai, but we need water infrastructure to work here at home. We need to restore dignity. Urgently.