‘king’ lords it in his own Nkandla
water. Access, but not flowing water. The publicly available version of this plan seems to miss out on key facts: “The percentage of households with access to piped water dropped from 99.1% in 2007 to …% [sic] in 2011.”
The only concrete information on service delivery in the municipality comes from other departments.
The national water affairs department talks of the R8-million spent on building a new threemillion litre reservoir to take water pumped up from a new water treatment plant.
The reservoir is finished, and forms the easternmost boundary of Ezenzeleni. The grass has been cut and bird nests crowd the shadier parts of the massive cement reservoir. No water is flowing. Large black circles around cracks in the reservoir show a problem that will be expensive to fix. “LEAK” is written in bold letters next to these.
A water engineer who is familiar with the shortcuts taken in construction to maximise profits says this is where the bolts holding the original shuttering will have gone.
A special kind of cement is supposed to be poured into these holes. But it is expensive.
“We used to build water infrastructure to last a century. Now it’s quadruple the cost and falls apart in five years,” the engineer said when shown a picture of the reservoir.
A collapse has already occurred in the new section of Ezenzeleni, where the government has been building RDP houses.
The red brick homes that are now welcoming new owners were built at a cost of R15-million by Koena Property Developers, based in Newcastle — where the phone rings without answer.
The houses’ yards are stark, devoid of grass or any other vegetation. But people have started erecting fences, covered in old maize sacks to keep the wind out.
Succulents are the main choice of plant, with water not being readily available for any food crops.
Despite the project starting half a decade ago, the houses are new because the 336 RDP houses that were i n i t i a l l y b u i l t we r e declared uninhabitable and knocked down. Koena was one of the companies responsible for that R10-million project.
The new homeowners tell the M&G that they have made peace with this delay.
Sitting in the shade, clutching a long metal rod, one old man says delivery still takes place: “The [water] tanker comes at 6am and we have water. Things are good.”
The old tractor and trailer collecting rubbish stops at his neighbour’s yard. Groups of workers in the ubiquitous orange public works overalls pick up and burn waste all over Ezenzeleni.
Everyone else the M&G talks to in the new part of the township is concerned about the delay in services, but happy that there are alternatives.
It is in the older sections, closer to the wetland further down the hill, that people are more disgruntled. Many are on still on the waiting list for an RDP house — a list that should have been shortened by a further 336 houses if the previous contract had not required that double the money be spent.
The “king of Warden” may be able to wield more power with his promotion to national government, but in his hometown service delivery suffers the same malaise as elsewhere in the country: last year the public works department told Parliament that R58-billion was being spent to repair poorly built RDP houses.