One toilet for 22 people
‘There’s no privacy here, to the point people cannot enjoy their sex lives’
There is only one bucket toilet for 22 people living in one crammed yard in the L&J informal settlement near Olifantsfontein in Ekurhuleni.
Their government-issued mobile toilet takes two days to fill up, which often forces them to beg their neighbours to relieve themselves.
Their plight has turned into a joke among municipal workers who empty the buckets. “They accuse us of eating a lot,” said Sarah Khoza, a resident. Lack of space is also an issue. “We are so crammed here. I have to be careful of what I say when I argue with my boyfriend. There is no privacy, to the point that people here can’t even enjoy their sex life,” Khoza added.
The sanitation issue and lack of services for residents is so dire that last week the community barricaded the busy R21 highway and M57, demanding Ekurhuleni municipality to relocate them to a land the council had allegedly promised them in 2015. The community is made up of about 3 000 shacks and an estimated 6 000 residents.
Their shack sprawl was established in 1984 when the owner of the land allowed his employees to build there.
But over the years the population has increased dramatically with job-seekers flocking to the area because of the factories that have mushroomed nearby.
Locals here are cut off from services, and many live in squalor. Heaps of dumping sites line the streets near several toilets. The settlement has 12 communal tanks for water, which residents have to clean regularly as rats, old rags and baby diapers have been found inside in the past. The only source of electricity are the government-issued solar panels. There are no street lights.
Community activist Thomas Mokoena, said their anger boiled over last week after the Ekurhuleni council ignored a memorandum they delivered to human settlements MEC Lesiba Mpya on March 10. Sowetan has seen a video of Mpya’s speech in which he promised to attend to the community’s demands before the end of that month. But he never fulfilled his promise.
“A series of meetings has been scheduled for all informal settlements. I’ve been on a roadshow for the past few months. I’m seeing the L&J community on Tuesday (tomorrow),” said Mpya yesterday.
But Mokoena said: “They keep making all these promises. It has got to a point where we even doubt that the land they promised to relocate us to in 2015 even exists.”