by Mandy de Waal, GroundUp
Ma Gladys Mphepho hovers over a pot on a two plate cooker in
her shack in Papamani, an informal settlement outside of Grahamstown. “We do
not have dignity,” she says, stirring the rice, flavoured with beef stock, that
is her family’s Sunday lunch. “We do not know what it means to have dignity.
Forget about any question of dignity,” says Mphepho.
It is a sweltering day in the heat of summer and Mphepho is
talking about her daily struggle to live, which is exacerbated by the crisis
that the people of Papamani, and greater Grahamstown, have with water. There
are two taps in the whole of Papamani which serve close on 30 homes. Each home
houses some five or six people. Do the maths, and that’s over 150 people who
get water from two taps. That’s to drink, make food with, to wash with and to
do anything else that requires water.
“When the tap runs dry or doesn’t work you have to take your
bucket and go out and look for water. You can travel for the whole day and only
come home in the evening,” says Mphepho. Grahamstown has experienced business
and population growth that has put its arcane water system under pressure.
Electrical failures in the city often bring with them a disruption in the water
supply, and adding to the complexity is mismanagement and maladministration of
the water system.
A local source, speaking anonymously, told of how a
municipal water pump was retained by contractors for months because the repair
bill for that pump had not been paid by the Makana Municipality. The lived
reality of these service delivery problems is that taps can go dry for up to
sixteen days at a time. The tragedy is that lives have already been lost
because of this.
In March 2013, 34 year old David Makele left his home in
Hlalani in the Makana Municipality to go and search for water. The taps had
been dry for the whole weekend. He collected water from a municipal truck in a
nearby district, but did not make it back. He collapsed and died on the way
home.
The terrible irony is that Makele’s death came on the eve of
SA’s National Water Week, which was promoted by the Department of Water Affairs
from 18 to 24 March, 2013. Makele is one of many people across the country
whose lives have been taken in the fight to the death for water – a battle
that’s becoming known as South Africa’s water wars.
In January this year four people died after violent protests
erupted in the Mothutlung township near Brits because of water shortages.
Governed by the Madibeng Municipality, there’s been an ongoing history of
corruption and maladministration in this ANC-led district. The service delivery
has been wanting, and posts on the municipality’s Facebook page tell their own
story of the area’s water problems. “Pathetic local municipality that does not
care about the needs of its residents,” writes Lesley Mathe on Facebook.
“Madibeng is the most corrupt of all the municipality in the North West,” vents
Papi Nhlapo. “And now tanker truck owners are sabotaging the service delivery
by destroying pipelines so as to continue receiving tenders from the
municipality… shame on our government.”
“What I don't understand is water is the number one basic
right and we still have to fight for it,” writes John Seema, describing the
agony of his family being forced to go without water, while (he claims) members
of the local municipality drive new Audis. “My family is in great pain now
because of your careless acts and selfishness. What kind of municipality are
you mara? Your such a disgrace to the people of South Africa. Things like this
make you think we should have stayed in the apartait [apartheid] regime service
delivery was so much better. ANC MY SWAGGER. ANC MY SWAGGER SE GAT.”
The anger evident in Makana Municipality’s Papamani and
Hlalani, or Madibeng Municipality’s Mothutlung is a rage that’s seething across
the country, and in some communities it’s spilling over into violence. Only
this is a bloody battle that sees a government pitted against its own people as
protests and police engage head on in what is often a fight to the death.
The rage is often long coming — as it was in the North West
in February 2013, when residents from Hammanskraal and Steve Bikoville
protested after going without a reliable, clean water source for as long as two
months. “We get sick from the water. We develop stomach cramps and diarrhoea.
Sometimes I even bleed when I have diarrhoea,” a protester told the Pretoria
News at the time.
In its electioneering material the ANC claims that nine out
of ten people now have access to water. “1994 – 10% of our communities had
access to safe water,” a massive billboard over a main road in Pretoria reads.
“2013 – more than 92% of our communities have access to safe water.”
A nationwide investigative journalism project undertaken by
Eye Witness News (EWN) revealed a different picture from these figures, which
are endorsed by the latest government census. “The last seven years have seen a
dramatic drop in how communities perceive the quality of their water,” reports
EWN. “Millions of people don't have access at all while others report queuing for
up to ten hours to get a single bucket of water.”
In June last year the DA’s provincial leader for the Free
State, Patricia Kopane claimed that at least 26 towns in the province had “no
water at all”, “water supply disruptions, or extremely unhygienic water coming
from their taps”. In that same month, the South African Human Rights Commission
(SAHRC) released a damning report on SA’s water crisis on the back of a deluge
of continuous complaints about shortages, irregular supply and unsafe water for
a couple of years.
The report showed that SA’s water and wastewater treatment
plants are in a dire state of disrepair; that many households have access to
infrastructure that was either never functional or was functional but has since
broken or has not been maintained. The infrastructural problems, the SAHRC
said, were due to poor original workmanship and a lack of maintenance.
The study showed that many households still used buckets and
fields to meet their sanitation needs, and the SAHRC said this created health
problems that spread through marginalised communities; and exposed women and
young girls to sexual assault when they used fields for sanitation. Another
equally damning report is expected from the SAHRC later this year.
SA’s constitution enjoins the state to realise people’s
right to water, a right which the United Nations Human Rights Council notes is
“inextricably related to the right to the highest attainable standard of
physical and mental health, as well as the right to life and human dignity.”
On 13 April 2011 in Ficksburg in the Free State a man hailed
by his community as a nation-builder and a civic-minded person died after
facing off against police in an attempt to get them from aiming water cannons
at elderly people who formed part of a service delivery protest. Andries Tatane
became a lionized public casualty of South Africa’s ‘water wars’ – the battle
by ordinary communities to assert their most fundamental right – the right to
water security.
But Tatane’s tragedy reached the world only because his
death was captured on television. For the most part those who die in SA’s water
protests are ‘anonymous’ - the reports of their deaths are treated by the news
as: “Another resident of Mothutlung, near Brits, has died after he allegedly
tried to escape from a moving Nyala armoured vehicle”; or “On Monday, two
people were killed allegedly by the police during the protest.”
Tatane’s case was different. He had a face, a name and a
narrative. In the month of his death protesters would gather outside the courts
to try and secure justice for Tatane’s death (a justice that would never come).
The placards these people held read, “We wanted water, but we got blood".
Back in Grahamstown’s Papamani, Gladys Mphepho says that
even when there is water, the quality is not good. “We fetch water with
buckets, but the water tastes bad. You can see the sediment at the bottom, and
it smells like ammonia sometimes.” (The ammonia smell is likely because
Grahamstown’s water is being treated with chloramines - a combination of
chlorine and ammonia that’s commonly used to disinfect water systems.)
In Pampamani, Mphepho says that complaints fall on deaf
ears. “We complain. We meet with the mayor. We protest. But all we get are
broken promises. I live with my three children and three grandchildren, and
struggle for employment and to try and get money to survive. Our household
tries to survive on the government grant we get of R750 a month, and the couple
of hundred rand my son gets from public works projects,” says Mphepho.
The grandmother describes how the family uses a pit toilet,
that must be relocated in a new section of the small yard when it gets full.
“We dig a hole two metres deep and move the toilet,” she says. The word toilet
in this sense is a euphemism. It is essentially a small lean-to that surrounds
an old wooden box with a portal to a hole in the ground. Next to the box are a
couple of pieces of newspaper.
The struggle for water continues across the country as
communities try to survive failing water systems, municipal maladministration
and corruption that robs people of their most fundamental rights. It is a
struggle that sparks ongoing protests and violence, say the experts.
A study by Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies
(Plaas) shows protests related to water issues were becoming “more frequent and
more violent”, and are increasing in geography. The report by Barbara Tapela
shows that protest action was once an urban phenomenon, but that now “violent
protests tend to occur in low to middle income residential areas.” And “recent
evidence shows (an) increase in rural protests” too.
The Service Delivery Protest Barometer set up by the
Community Law Centre of the University of the Western Cape to gain
understanding of the reasons behind these kinds of protests, shows violent
protests have increased markedly since mid 2010.
Plaas’ Tapela says the causes for SA’s water protests are a
lack of accountability, corruption, indifference and non-compliance on the part
of water service officials. While triggers for the people who suffer from
service delivery outages include mounting frustration and unmet expectations.
As corruption, maladministration and system failures bite the anger is rising.
In short the simple story about water in South Africa is
this:
Water is life.
No water. No dignity.
No water. No peace.
