Stuck in ‘shit houses’ for 10 years,
The municipality in North West has been riven by ANC infighting and nepotism for years, causing people to live in sewage, without water and other services
Waking up to sewage in your home, no water for 21 hours a day, rubbish that has not been collected for more than 10 years, walking on “tarred” roads that look more like gravel ones and having to abandon your house and live in a shack because you cannot take the smell anymore.
This is the reality for many of the residents of Blydeville in Lichtenburg caused by the failure of the Ditsobotla local municipality in the North West — and the 29 May general elections have given them no reason to be optimistic.
Nick Kubelo, a tavern owner whose house has been dubbed “ko masepeng” or “shit house” because of continuous sewage spills, says he has been raising the issue with the municipality for the past 10 years without luck.
“This pains me so much … I was recently called to the school because my children are being labelled as people who stay ‘ko masepeng’. This smell is not good for my children, if it was only me, it would be better,” he told the Mail & Guardian.
Every day at 4pm, Kubelo has to open a manhole near his house because if he doesn’t, the sewage spills into his house through the toilet.
“People come back from work and use a lot of water and that’s when it becomes bad. Now I’m forced to walk in the sewer and open it so that it can flow in different directions from my house and it’s also dangerous because children can fall into the manhole.”
Kubelo once filled buckets with the sewage and threw their contents inside the council office to vent his frustrations, but the municipality continued to ignore him.
“Even after this incident they still didn’t come. I have told myself that after the elections, I will go and throw the bucket of sewage in the municipality again. I am ready to be arrested and face a magistrate to tell him of the pain my children face every day,” he said.
But despite all these problems, Kubelo will still vote for the governing ANC on 29 May.
“To be honest, I would not have this tavern if it wasn’t for the ANC, but unfortunately the ANC now only remembers people during campaigning season,” he said.
Tshepo Lekanyane, whose family has had to drill holes inside their house to allow the sewage to drain out, is also frustrated. The house next to his is uninhabited, after his neighbours abandoned it because of the unhealthy conditions.
“They decided to go and build a shack somewhere because they could not take it anymore. We are not even worried about the [other] services anymore, if they can only fix the sewer issues. We have been living like this for the past six or seven years,” Lekanyane said.
Another resident, Boitumelo Dyers, complained about uncollected rubbish, electricity outages and the poor condition of the roads. She has not seen a rubbish collector in the area for the past 10 years and water only runs in the taps from 7am to 9am.
“It’s also a sometimes thing because sometimes there’s no water at all and there’s no explanation. When you don’t have water, you can’t even go to the toilet.
“We are also forced to create our own dumping sites. It has been more than 10 years since we saw a municipal truck passing here, we only see them in town.”
Dyers said many residents believed that voting was a useless exercise and they would give it a miss, but she would definitely cast her ballot.
Mayor Thabo Nkashe said the department of environmental services had temporarily suspended household waste collection in the entire municipality and all the trucks were grounded because of mechanical problems.
He said the municipality was in a dire financial situation, which hampered its ability to render some of the services under its mandate.
“Our roads are in a terrible state. We are currently unable to maintain our roads due to cash flow problems and budgetary constraints within the municipality. However, we are working around the clock to turn around the financial position of the municipality to ensure that we attend to service delivery backlogs.”
In 2022, the national department of cooperative governance and traditional affairs placed the Ditsobotla municipality under administration after warring ANC factions led to a collapse of services.
For most of that year, the municipality had two mayors, two council speakers and two municipal managers occupying the posts at the same time.
Ditsobotla received an adverse report from the auditor general for the 2022-23 financial year, which found that the municipality did not have “adequate systems to correctly record and classify expenditure”.
It highlighted more than R14.7 billion in unauthorised and irregular expenditure, up from R9.6 billion from the previous year. The auditor general said unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure were not investigated to determine whether any person was liable for the poor financial management.
“The performance management system and related control was not maintained and it did not adequately describe how the performance measurements, review and reporting processes should be managed,” it added.
Former mayor Boitumelo Lethoko told the North West standing committee on provincial public accounts in May last year that the balance in the municipal bank account was zero and that the situation was so dire that the municipality could not even buy toilet paper.
The ANC infighting in the municipality is a reflection of divisions in the wider province dating back to the reign of former premier and ANC provincial chair Supra Mahumapelo, who was accused of running parallel ANC structures and was later removed along with the entire provincial executive committee. A provincial task team led by Job Mokgoro fared no better.
During a visit to Ngaka Modiri Molema region, which includes Ditsobotla, in May last year, President Cyril Ramaphosa warned ANC branches that the party would lose the