Watering cans.
“QwaQwa is burning,” say residents who have been without water for more than a week and without running water for two and a half years.
Last week, after tankers hired by the municipality stopped delivering water, roads were blocked by burning tyres and rocks. Residents say this was in an effort to demand their constitutional right to water.
This week, police and thunderous rains intervened to bring an uneasy peace, but the metal skeletons of burnt tyres still remain along the edge of tar roads. Police vans speed along the muddy roads, past brightly-painted homes of the angrier residents.
Standing outside one of these homes, Manapo Motsoeneng keeps lifting her hands into the air, towards heaven as she talks. This is where the driving rain comes from. Its fat drops splatter across her red-tiled roof, flooding down to make a curtain of water down the sides of her verandah. Its waxed floor is muddy. Everything and everyone is wet and muddy after a week of heavy rain. After three years of drought, this is a good problem for the eastern Free State residents.
“We had so many people praying for rain and now, finally, we have water,” says Motsoeneng. The grandmother’s family has lined a haphazard assortment of blue, yellow and faded white plastic buckets next to zinc baths to catch the water. A new water tank, balanced on tyres and rocks, collects water from another part of the roof via a gutter. The rusted wire keeping that in place fails to stop the gutter shaking with the heavy water flow.
The process is repeated in her neighbour’s homes in Borata village. Each cement and brick home, individually painted in a primary colour, has a water collection production line, with people taking full containers inside to be decanted into unused baths and buckets.
This, says Motsoeneng, shouldn’t be the case. Adjusting the blanket on her back that keeps one of her grandchildren held tight, she shakes her head and points towards the north, where the municipal buildings of QwaQwa mingle with new shopping centres. “They have no idea how to look after people.”
The problem started with the 2014 drought when Fika Patso Dam was not replenished after a dry winter.
Normally, the clouds that gather over the towering, 2 500m Maluti mountain range on Lesotho’s border drop rain for the villages which form QwaQwa and the Thabo Mofutsanyane Municipality. The area’s 330 000 people grow mielies in their yards and the cement reservoirs of water utility Mac Water supply homes.
During the drought the dam emptied and water stopped flowing out of taps. Emergency access was granted to water from the nearby Sterkfontein Dam – the water source of last resort for the Vaal system and Gauteng. The only problem was this supply came from a single hydrant and it wasn’t connected to the QwaQwa water system.
With only one, dull-yellow, tanker of its own to transport the water, the municipality asked for help. Dozens of local entrepreneurs stepped up, attracted by the opportunity for an income in an area with 42% unemployment. No contracts were given.
Instead, the municipality gave each water tanker an area to supply and promised payment each month for the water supplied. In general, each truck would deliver 10 000 litres of water at a time, with the municipal water board paying R700 for each load. For trucks doing three trips from the water supply point to residents of the villages, this could result in R65 000 earned each month.
The only problem with that business model came when the water board stopped paying the tankers. Sitting on the red-and-white striped seats of QwaQwa’s Wimpy, three water tanker owners say they haven’t been paid in six months.
“We are now bad creditors,” says Mike Ndaba. In more than two years of supplying water, the three say non-payment has been an all-too-regular reality. “In the beginning we would go to banks and get loans to buy new tankers. Then they blacklisted us. Now we can’t even get loan sharks to give us money for diesel.”
The stories other tanker owners share are the same. One halted construction on his house to use the money to buy a tanker. Another took money from the savings for his two children to go to university. Those that took loans had to pay them back, with their homes mortgaged as security. When payment didn’t come, the banks repossessed their homes and assets.
United by similar experiences, the owners of 51 water tankers formed the QwaQwa Water Tanker Supplier Association. They use their numbers to bargain with the municipality, collectively refusing to deliver water after long periods without payment. The last time they took this step, in December, the municipality promised payment in full by January.
“They never paid us. Now we can’t afford diesel,” says Johannes Phakisi, one of the three owners.
Without money, Phakisi and his fellow tanker owners stopped delivering water on February 16. The decision was a tough one, because residents get angry when they stop. The emergency tankers supplied by the national water and sanitation department had already stopped supplying water, on February 1, after their contract ran out. The municipality is back to its one tanker.
Ndaba says: “We are rendering services for the municipality and people think we are to blame when they stop getting water.”
Those tanker owners who have given their cell numbers to villagers get furious phone calls. Some include threats. After the December halt in delivery, one tanker was stoned.
The threat of more violence is ever-present, says Ndaba. “As we stop and fight for money, there is a louder noise behind us. The community is angry because water is important.”
The owners are hoping that the water crisis will force the municipality to see reason and pay them so they can buy diesel and service their vehicles – QwaQwa’s roads are more pothole than tarmac and a truck tyre costs R4 800.
The recent rains have helped to fill the municipal dam. But large parts of QwaQwa’s water infrastructure has been damaged by people who broke open pipes to get water. Little money has been spent on maintenance – the auditor general says the municipality spent 38% of its money on “fruitless and wasteful expenditure” last year – and the pipes cannot handle new pressure if water were to be released from the dam.
One local water engineer, working as a private contractor, says: “They don’t even have a map for most of the pipes around here.”
An ANC councillor, talking outside of his official capacity, disagrees with the negative prognosis. “All we have now is a small-nyana problem. Come back in a week and it will be fixed.”
Behind him, a woman carefully pours water from one bucket into another so she can put it back in the rain. “People are making this seem like more of a problem than there is,” the councillor adds.
The heavy rain means that, for this week, his statement is true. The villagers do have water.
But when the rain stops, the tankers might not deliver water, and the infrastructure cannot fill the reservoirs.