Politicians have failed the poor people of Hammanskraal

My friend’s message chilled me. I had been on a 15-hour flight from New York to Johannesburg.

When I landed, I turned my phone on.

Hers was the first message to pop up.

“Dear Justice,” it said. “I remember arriving in Joburg in 2007 and being so proud that I was finally in an African city where you could drink the best water in the world straight from the tap.

Now I am listening to the radio announcing that 15 people [the death toll at the time] had died of cholera from the water in Hammanskraal. This seems like a tipping point.”

“My friend was born in Ethiopia.

Her family had fled war and persecution and lived in several other African countries from where they had to flee again and again in the 1980s as wars spread.

They ended up in the US. She managed to come back to Africa, where she feels most at home, and lived in Rwanda and then SA.

To hear someone who lived through wars and famine point out to me just what dire straits our country is in, made me stop in my tracks.

It chilled me, as it should all of us.

The water system is killing poor people, the electricity grid is on the verge of collapse, the roads are a disaster

We should consider ourselves lucky that the poor are not rising up.

The truth is that the horrific deaths of all those people in Hammanskraal are not a matter of fate, but a result of the fact that our political leaders — in this case both the ANC and the DA, which has run Tshwane on and off since 2016 — have failed us.

The Hammanskraal water problem has been with us for decades. The government has failed to deal with it.

The families of the people who have now died should sue the state and its officials for the deaths of their relatives.

I would suggest that politicians and officials in the water departments and municipalities should be charged with murder, but that will never happen.

We don’t have a functioning police service, and the National Prosecuting Authority would not know how to prosecute such a case.

I am angry about all this partly because I grew up in Hammanskraal, in a village called New Eersterus, where there was no running water or electricity until the Mandela administration came into power in 1994.

That village was proudly new South African, proudly ANC, because the party had delivered the most basic of services to it in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

It didn’t last that long. The water pipes were so badly laid, sometimes just a hand’s depth below the ground, that soon there were water bursts everywhere.

Within months the entire system was destroyed. New pipes had to be laid, new work done.

The roads are the same. On Saturday, I went to visit my mother and I had to find alternative roads to get to her house.

Roadworks started two years ago have been abandoned allegedly because monies were paid to the contractor — and the man never received the cash.

He couldn’t continue with the project and the whole place has turned into a soggy mess.

No-one, it seems, has been arrested for paying a “ghost contractor” millions of rand.’ This is corruption in broad daylight.

The water that is now being provided to the villages hit by cholera are from my mother s village, New Eersterus, and the nearby Stinkwater (yes, that’s correct) because these villages’ water source is from a different, clean, source (Rand Water and Magalies Water) from the infected water in places like Temba township.

As reported in the Sunday Times this weekend, this water is being provided by water trucks.

Here is the heart of the corruption.

If clean water was being piped to people in these villages, there would be no need for water tankers to ferry water to them.

As the Sunday Times wrote, the Tshwane municipality spent just R8.1m on water tankers in Hammanskraal in the 2018/2019 financial year.

The expenditure ballooned to R85.3m in the 2021/2022 financial year.

The city has spent R250m in the past five financial years on these privately owned water tankers in Hammanskraal alone.

Follow the money.

As in many other municipalities which have seen a similar trend where water provision is disrupted (particularly in the North West province), most of these water tankers are linked to a ward councillor or a relative of a politician.

These people destroy water infrastructure so that they can provide water tanker services.

They can’t be investigated or arrested because the politicians are the perpetrators of these crimes.

The modus operandi is the same in the construction mafia where companies now cannot begin building without paying massive bribes, the coal mafia where miners are intimidated and killed to pay bribes, the hospital mafia where the Babita Deokarans of this world are killed in broad daylight, and many other aspects of our daily lives.

What is happening in Hammanskraal is murder.