‘EVERY DAY IS OUR DAY ZERO’
A frantic drive to save water is on in drought-stricken Cape Town – but people in informal settlements have been living the reality of Day Zero for decades. YOU spoke to three Khayelitsha residents
SHE carries three empty 20-litre containers with the help of her grandchildren. Heading to the communal tap in the sprawling Cape Town township of Khayelitsha, Khululwa Joda has been living the dreaded Day Zero all her life. She fills the containers to the brim and walks back to her shack. The 60 litres will be enough for her family of eight to drink, cook and bathe with for the day, she says.
The family isn’t panicked about the drought devastating the Mother City. They’re unaffected by the water restrictions that have caused hundreds of thousands of Capetonians to change the way they live their lives and think about the precious resource they used to take for granted.
Khululwa, and thousands of township dwellers like her, are used to making do with only a small amount of water a day.
With no access to a flushing toilet or running water in her house, she’s learnt to live on as little as possible every day. But that doesn’t mean she and her family of three adults and five children don’t do their bit to save water, the 58-year-old sangoma tells YOU. “We used to wash our clothes any day of the week but now we’ve cut it down to just weekends. “We know the situation is bad. We’ve seen it on TV and heard about it on the radio,” she says. When Khululwa and her family realised just how dire the situation was, she started stockpiling rations in the house. They keep about 40 litres of water for emergencies even though the City of Cape Town has said township dwellers won’t be affected if they don’t have access to water in their homes. Water will continue to be piped to communal taps. At the time of going to print, Day Zero – the day the city turns off taps to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses – stood at 12 April and panic had started to set in as people tried to plan for a drastic change in their way of life.
When the day comes everyone will be forced to queue for water from taps – something that’s an everyday routine for Khululwa.
She stresses she’s doing what she can to save water.
Although she relies heavily on the precious liquid to make medicine for her healing work, she’s determined to use as little of it as possible.
She has cut down her consultation hours and asks her clients to bring their own water, “especially if they seek to be cleansed”.
“We have to work together if we’re going to make it out of this,” she says. “There’s no other way.”
NONESI Mabola (28), an unemployed mother of three from Khayelitsha, claims she had no idea just how bad the drought was until YOU arrived to chat to her.
We meet her at a communal tap across the road from her home, where she fills
a 20-litre container that will last her family of four the whole day.
With no TV or radio in her home, all she knows is what she hears from neighbours and commuters in taxis. “But I had no idea how serious it was,” she says.
She hasn’t been stockpiling water and if the city fails to keep communal taps running she hopes to be rescued by the trucks that have “brought water to collection points in the past”.
Buying bottled water is simply too expensive for her.
“I’ve never bought it before,” she says. “There’s no way I’d be able to.”
The City of Cape Town has plans to make “new water”, by building desalination plants, tapping into aquifers and drilling more boreholes.
But it all costs money and desalination is especially expensive and complex, DA leader Mmusi Maimane said recently.
“And the problem is there simply isn’t money. Large- scale facilities cost anything up to R15 billion,” he said.
“That’s a third of Cape Town’s annual budget. No city can afford such facilities on its own.”
He undertook to update the country every week on the status of the drought as Day Zero grows ever closer.
THE situation in Cape Town may be dominating headlines but it’s by no means the only parched province in SA. Nelson Mandela Bay in the Eastern Cape is in dire straits too. At the time of going to print, the overall capacity of Cape Town dams was 26,7% while Nelson Mandela Bay’s stood at just 21,17%. Residents have been restricted to 60 litres of water for each person a day. But it’s Cape Town where the focus lies. It could become the first major city in the world to run out of water, placing four million people at risk of disease and having a catastrophic effect on the economy.
Xanthea Limberg, mayoral committee member for informal settlements, water and waste services and energy, says Day Zero can still be avoided if every resident ensures they use no more than 50 litres of water a day.
If they don’t, it’s taps off.
Ayanda Seoka, who runs his own carwash business in Khayelitsha, is suffering more every day.
Unable to afford the waterless products other larger car washes have started to use, he’s resorted to collecting buckets of water and washing vehicles by hand in the sweltering summer heat.
It’s tough, he says, but he has no choice. Hosepipes are banned and everyone is trying to save where they can. S