Sewage ordeal torments Emfuleni
For more than a month, wheelchairbound Mampe Ramaele has been unable to leave her home in Boipatong because sewage overflowing from a nearby manhole has formed a stinking moat around her house. If she does try to leave, her wheels get stuck in the sludge.
Boipatong lies on the edge of the Vaal River between bulk wastewater pipes and the wastewater treatment plant that is supposed to treat the sewage and release clean water into the river.
Sewage from as far away as Johannesburg is pumped to the inadequate and congested treatment facility. The effluent then pushes into Boipatong’s sewerage pipe network and bubbles up through manholes and the toilets in residents’ homes.
Resident Isaac Mofokeng founded the Itireleng Task Team last year and mobilised 10 other unemployed residents, funded by donations from the community, to build barriers to divert sewage from their streets.
His group has grown to 20 and now they unblock the sewerage systems themselves.
Mofokeng said he won’t be voting this year. “Things have to change. I’m not voting because all councillors are failing us.”
Fellow resident Modise Molefe acts as a go-between for residents and the Emfuleni municipality, collecting complaints and taking photographs. Even the local police approached him after their station was flooded with sewage and their complaints to the municipality fell on deaf ears.
Molefe is known for his fights with municipal councillors who he says like to show up when the fixing happens. He says he’s been approached by the ANC, the EFF and the DA to campaign for them but he’s rejected them all.
Despite this, he is changing his vote this year because of poor management by the ANC-led Emfuleni municipality.
“Things have to change and for them to change there has to be a change in how we vote.”
Since 2018, efforts to fix the wastewater problem have fallen to Rand Water, then to the South African National Defence Force and then to the Ekurhuleni Water Care Co
(Erwat). There were even plans to enlist engineers from Cuba, but the system remains broken.
Earlier this year the Human Rights Commission (HRC) reported that the Vaal Dam, on which about 19-million people depend for drinking water, is polluted beyond acceptable standards and “may very well have been irreparably damaged”.
In June the then minister of water & sanitation Lindiwe Sisulu handed over the operations and maintenance of Emfuleni municipality’s water infrastructure to Rand Water.
It will cost R2.2bn to fix the system, which includes three wastewater treatment works and critical pump stations.
Meanwhile, sewage continues to pour into
the Vaal River.
Maureen Stewart from the Save the Vaal organisation said that since Erwat ended its involvement in June last year there has been no maintenance and all the pipes are blocked again.
“In July, Sisulu said they were going to take over maintenance and ‘hit the ground running’, but there has been no action and no response to our queries to the department or Rand Water,” she said.
“The state the treatment plant is in is like it was in 2018 — we’re back to square one. Raw sewage continues to flow into the river, mostly from the Sebokeng water plant. The Rietspruit treatment plant is operating at 20% capacity and the Leeukuil treatment has
capacity but the pumps aren’t working.”
HRC Gauteng head Buang Jones said commissioners will meet department officials next month to discuss the problem.
“There hasn’t been significant improvement. Even during the inquiry we made it clear that government should continue to address spills and not wait till the outcome of the inquiry. We are concerned at the slow process, it will take time to disinfect sewers, put in new networks and expand and fix the pumps,” he said
Meanwhile, in her house in Boipatong, Ramaele says she’s not changing who she’ll vote for this year, if she can leave her house.
“My vote won’t change — it doesn’t make a difference.”