Pretoria - Municipalities have a constitutional duty to provide residents with water. However, the City of Tshwane is failing in this regard, according to residents of Hammanskraal.
The community is so unhappy with the City of Tshwane’s failure to provide water that it has resolved to approach the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, to compel the metro to provide adequate water.
“In the past few days not a single tanker even went to any area, and it was for this reason that we decided to approach the court to assist us in compelling the municipality to provide us with water as agreed upon,” said Tumelo Koitheng, chairperson of the Hammanskraal Residents’ Forum.
Koitheng said the residents were well aware that their water woes would not be fixed overnight. They were pleading for consistent supply and adequate communication from the City of Tshwane, he said.
For an entire week the community of Hammanskraal, which relied on water tankers from the municipality to get by, was left with not a single tanker.
There was also no communication forthcoming from the municipality as to what the problem was.
Koitheng said the poor water quality in the area had been a bone of contention for some time, to the point where the SA Human Rights Commission tried to intervene.
The challenges at the Temba Dam stream, from where Hammanskraal residents get a portion of their drinking water, has been contaminated. This has been attributed to the ageing Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant.
Koitheng said although plans to upgrade the treatment plant had already commenced and were earmarked to take anywhere up to at least five years to complete, in the interim the municipality had agreed to provide water tankers to the community to ensure that they still had access to a basic need, water.
However, as time went by they found the City had started sending fewer tankers into the area, he said, to the extent that recently residents sometimes went as many as four weeks without a single tanker coming to deliver water to some parts.
“We know our water issues will not be solved until Rooiwal, which is the source of the contamination, is upgraded and functioning well so it can stop spilling waste into the Apies River.
“However, the fact of the matter is that the municipality has forgotten itself hence we had no other option than to turn to the courts.”
When the water tankers initially started coming the community knew that water would be delivered twice a week, according to Koitheng. When they stopped residents were not alerted to what the problem was or when the services would resume.
He said they were eventually informed that a new service provider had been appointed by the City.
However, a temporary solution should have been implemented as not everyone from the community could afford to buy water while the new supplier got started.
“The City is telling us nothing, we don’t know how many trucks are allocated to us. They don’t respond to communication and it’s frustrating all of us as we’ve reached the ceiling politically trying to solve this.
“All we have left is to join hands with farmers and take the legal route.
“We are pleased that the court ordered that we should be delivered water pending finalisation of the Rooiwal treatment plant upgrades. Unfortunately for us there is no political will to help this community. We are fighting alone all the time for a basic right. We’re not asking for much, just clear and suitable drinking water.”
The City’s Lindela Mashigo announced, however, that rudimentary services to informal settlements would resume starting from today.
Mashigo said the service was briefly suspended for a few days last week after experiencing certain challenges which had since been resolved.
“The City wishes to apologise for the inconvenience caused by the temporary interruption of its critical service.”
Pretoria News