People of Makana deserve better

There is no injustice more grave than that of denying people their right to be human.

To do this is to essentially reduce them to subhumans, to render their existence and humanity insignificant and in so doing, to animalise them.

Nowhere has this dehumanisation been as blatant as it has been in the Eastern Cape province — a province where some of the most cruel injustices against the people occur.

This past week we witnessed yet another crime against the people, commissioned by the leadership of the province.

The provincial government and the Makana Local Municipality were given a necessary tongue-lashing by Judge Inga Stretch of the Makhanda High Court, who dismissed their bid to appeal the ruling to place the municipality under administration.

Last year, the Unemployed People’s Movement and other civil society organisations took the Makana Local Municipality to court, accusing it of corruption, failure to provide water and sewage services and a serious neglect of municipal infrastructure.

In January this year, the courts ordered that the municipality be placed under administration for violating its constitutional mandate by failing to provide basic services to communities.

The provincial government and Makana Local Municipality sought to appeal this ruling on the grounds that the court did not have the powers to dissolve an elected council.

They argued that the principle of the separation of powers was being undermined by the courts.

They also claimed that the court judgment failed to acknowledge the improvements that have been made in service delivery since the adoption of a financial recovery plan five years ago. I am not a lawyer, so I cannot argue the legality of Judge Stretch’s dismissal of the bid to appeal the ruling to dissolve Makana Local Municipality.

But I am a citizen of this country who lived in Makhanda, formerly Grahamstown, where I was a student at Rhodes University between 2012 and 2017.

I have seen and experienced first-hand what it means when a government disregards the constitutional rights of citizens.

I have experienced what it means to open a tap and have muddy water coming out, and to walk on roads that are so badly degraded that the potholes have begun to resemble sinkholes.

I know what it means to go on for days without water. Some of us could afford to buy this water, but thousands could not.

For years, thousands of people in Makhanda have been denied the right to clean drinking water, a constitutionally enshrined right.

These are the poorest of the poor, families who can barely make ends meet and who are then forced to either consume e-coli infested water or use money they don’t have to buy clean water from the shops.

The government’s argument that things have improved since 2015 is at best, laughable.

I left Makhanda in 2017 and the situation with service delivery and infrastructure was in a state of deterioration.

Shortly after I left, my sister went to study at Rhodes University and she too was still buying water from the shops because the water coming out of her tap was not fit for human consumption.

As recently as last year when I went to meet my supervisor, the roads could still be barely driven on. The potholes could puncture even the strongest of tyres. The sewage infrastructure is still exactly as it was when I first moved to Makhanda. So exactly where are these improvements, because I and many others certainly do not see or feel them?

It is unthinkable that in the midst of such a serious crisis of constitutional violation, the Eastern Cape government and Makana Local Municipality are invested mainly in their positions.

The argument for separation of powers is not genuine, it is an argument about people wanting to preserve their political standing. It is about people wanting to remain in council.

And this is the story of the province: a story about how the rights of people are subordinated to political interests. It is a story about how the lives of the poor matter very little.

It is a story about how the right to human dignity is nonexistent. And it is a story that must not continue to happen

— a story that the courts and the people must rewrite.