The Munsieville pump station, which should separate solid waste from liquids, has not worked for years, leading to raw sewage flowing through the township. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
A huge pool of raw sewage festers on the street outside Tebogo Kula’s rented home in Munsieville, a township in Krugersdorp, west of Johannesburg.
The property neighbours the dysfunctional Munsieville sewage pump station, which has not been operational for “months or years”, according to residents. The putrid stench of human waste is intolerable, Kula said, and is hazardous for her children, whom she often catches playing in the filth.
“The smell is so horrible,” she said. “My kids have runny tummies regularly. After we go to the toilet, we can see our poop floating past in the yard because of the blocked drain. How do you eat when you see your own poop and your family’s poop in your yard? You can’t even sit outside. There is no dignity for us here.”
Shared nightmare: Tebogo Kula lives in the house that Simon Radebe moved out of because of the stench and pollution in the yard. Photo by Delwyn Verasamy
Inside the pump station, which is run by the Mogale City local municipality, the equipment used to separate solid waste from liquids has been out of operation for such a long time that it is overrun with plants. The pumps, designed to send wastewater to the nearby dysfunctional Percy Stewart wastewater treatment works, are engulfed in sewage.
Trevor Brough, a director of the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site Association, said the Munsieville pump station is one of 13 out of 18 dysfunctional pump stations in Mogale City. Its period of dysfunctionality ranges from six months to several years.
On a sidewalk, raw sewage gushes from an overflowing manhole, flooding Ephraim Pheshoko’s garden. “I’m always at the doctor with illnesses,” he said. “I have to use the little money I have to take my kids to the doctor because we are always sick from this sewage. We can’t live like this anymore.”
Kula’s landlord, Simon Radebe, told of how he had to move two years ago and rent out his property because he and his family could not bear the stench from the pump station. “You can’t breathe in the yard. In summer, when it’s hot, you can’t even open your windows.
“That place is dangerous …. The smell, I’ve got sinus, was too much for me and when we moved we had a newborn. The soil under the house is so wet; it can collapse any time,” he said.
He added that his efforts to try to get the pollution resolved with Mogale City were fruitless. “They told us the motors inside that pump station are too expensive — they don’t have money to fix it.”
Anja du Plessis, an associate professor and research specialist in integrated water resource management at Unisa, said citizens have to live in an environment that is unsafe to their health.
“The government either needs to hold those [responsible for] non-operational wastewater treatment works accountable and actually address the sewage crisis or enable people with the required skills and knowledge to step in and address the rot that has been ongoing and rising in magnitude over the past two decades.”
And it’s where all this raw sewage ultimately ends up that also worries Brough: the sensitive Unesco Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, which accommodates the fossil hominid sites of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and environs.
“The bigger issue for us is downstream. This flows into the Blougatspruit. It comes out at a point on the Blougat slightly downstream from Percy Stewart. This now combines with the stuff that’s in the Blougat that comes from Percy Stewart, that comes from Krugersdorp itself, and we get this whole cocktail of sewage downstream in the Cradle area.”
Brough, who has been fighting the sewage pollution crisis in the Cradle of Humankind since 2019, spends his days conducting “Cradle Shit Tours” to highlight the extent of the sewage pollution fouling waterways and threatening human health, tourism, agriculture and groundwater in the World Heritage Site.
He said large volumes of untreated or partially treated wastewater have been flowing for several years.
From the Blougatspruit, the wastewater runs into the Riet, and then into the Bloubankspruit, which runs through the Cradle of Humankind and ultimately into the Hartbeespoort Dam.
“Everything just comes out of Percy Stewart the way it comes in. Percy Stewart is not functional. The machines and the aerators blow bubbles and things like that, but whether it’s actually working…” he shrugged. “Frankly, it’s not.”
Landowners in the Cradle of Humankind have escalated the sewage pollution for years, lodging formal complaints with Mogale City municipality, and with the South African Human Rights Commission, with Envirocrime and have been in “direct communication with a number of people within the department of water and sanitation”.
Aggrieved landowners, too, recently lodged a complaint with the United Nations Commission on Human Rights “because up until now there’s been zero progress to try and get the issue resolved”.
But the faecal contamination has only worsened. “The rivers in the Cradle area — which is supposed to be a World Heritage Site and is supposed to have universal values … they’re totally dead. There’s no life whatsoever in the rivers. The only life is E. coli and coliforms,” Brough said.
Efforts to get the pump station fixed by the municipality have been “fruitless”. Photo by Delwyn Verasamy
In July, downstream residents formed a “Save The River” group, raising about R300 000 to install a concrete floor at the Delportan sewage truck dump site, uphill from Percy Stewart, where trucks dump raw sewage collected from septic tanks, to stop sewage spillages into the Blougatspruit.
“The government is just not doing what it should be doing. It was largely done so we can show Mogale [City] that the residents are serious about getting the problem resolved. We got a contractor in and did the job, otherwise we’d still be waiting,” Brough said, detailing how because of this intervention, the spillages had stopped.
The latest Green Drop report, released by the water and sanitation department in December, notes that it is of “particular concern” that Mogale City has moved from a medium-risk to a high-risk category with all three of its wastewater treatment works, including Percy Stewart in the high-risk category.
“This WSI [water service institution] has been placed under regulatory surveillance and enforcement activities to ensure wastewater treatment improves,” the report notes.
“All three systems are in a high-risk category with an increase in risk at the Percy Stewart and Flip Human systems, which were previously in the medium-risk category… The regulator urges the municipality to conduct process audits to identify the root cause of the effluent failures and implement correct measures to protect downstream users and the receiving environment.”
Richard Meissner, a political scientist at Unisa who researches the politics of water management and governance, was horrified when he stood on the banks of the sickly-grey Blougatspruit.
“This is a total mess,” he said. “This is the definition of an open sewer, in my opinion. I can imagine 50 years ago, it would have been a nice river. If one of us falls in there and swallows this … you can go to hospital. I’ve never seen a river in such a state,” he said, shaking his head.
But the sickening stench “is not so bad today”, Brough offered, with a sardonic laugh. “Some days when I come here, even Fisherman’s Friends [mints] can’t kill the smell. All of this combines with the Bloubank, which eventually ends up in the underground Swartkrans compartment. Some of it ends up underground and some of it ends up in Hartbeespoort Dam.”
Du Plessis added: “We need to address these sources of pollution, especially in terms of the sewage crisis, and hold those to account. This [the sewage pollution in Mogale City] is one example of many and one of the worst I have seen. The river is a sewer posing a significant health risk and killing our rivers.”
The auditor general’s latest audit outcomes revealed that four municipalities in Gauteng regressed in audit reports — Mogale City, the City of Tshwane, Emfuleni local municipality and Merafong City local municipality.
In November 2022, Sean Phillips, the director general of the department of water and sanitation, wrote to Mariette Liefferink, of the Federation for a Sustainable Environment, informing her that his department had issued a directive in August 2020 for the sewage pollution against Mogale City over Percy Stewart. The department was monitoring the municipality’s action plan and the effluent water quality had not improved.
“The effluent quality, which is discharged, pollutes the water resources, which affects water users including the Cradle of Humankind and the Crocodile River, which feeds into the Hartbeespoort Dam.”
In June last year, Phillips said his department had funded phase one and two of the refurbishment of the Percy Stewart plant to the tune of R55 million. While phase one has been successfully implemented, “it seems that there are delays on the execution” of phase two and the department still intends taking “further enforcement action”.
Although the water and sanitation department has now laid criminal charges against Mogale City’s municipal manager, Makhosana Msezana, over the scale of the sewage pollution, this process will take time and may not bear fruit, Liefferink noted.
“In Randfontein, criminal charges were laid against the municipal manager [Themba Goba, the municipal manager of the Rand West City local municipality] for sewage pollution and he was sentenced to a fine of R10 million,” she said.
“Then, he just resigned. That same sewage works is still dysfunctional. I don’t know if the criminal charges work, unless they go to jail, so that it sets a precedent for other municipal managers not to perpetuate the delinquency.”
Brough points to a Council for Scientific and Industrial Research water resources status report for September 2022 to March 2023, which found that the microbiological quality of the water from the Sterkfontein Cave lake is “compromised by the increased total coliform bacteria and E. coli, which exceeds the standard health-related limits across all sample results and thus reflects the impact of poorer quality surface water on the karst groundwater”.
The report notes how across all the spring sample results, the microbiological quality of the water is compromised by the total coliform bacteria and E. coli.
A 2023 Unesco report on the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site describes how the bacteriological pollution at the Fossil Hominid Sites of Sterkfontein, Swartkrans, Kromdraai and Environs component by “coliform and E. coli persists above those common in natural environments in numerous sample locations.
Although these don’t hold any direct threat to the paleontological attributes, “the state party” — the minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment — is concerned about the effect of the pollution on the natural environment, the health of residents and the aesthetic appeal of the property’s natural resources, it said, noting that there are current intergovernmental discussions on the operation of one source that continues: Percy Stewart.
The problem of bacteriological pollution in surface water at the fossil hominid sites component “persists”, the report said, noting how in the previous state of conservation reports, “the state party already noted that discussions were taking place to address a major source of this pollution: the Percy Stewart wastewater treatment works”.
“The state party is concerned over the impacts of pollution on the attributes of the property negatively. The committee may wish to request the state party to urgently address this matter, including through the memorandum of understanding with the local municipality.”
The water and sanitation department and Mogale City did not respond to the Mail & Guardian’s inquiries this week.
Brough added: “Even if they sort out the problem at Percy Stewart today, it’s going to take how many years for the groundwater to get sorted out and for the ecosystem to be restored. Potentially, the Bloubankspruit, I would say, is high up on the list of the worst rivers in South Africa if you look at the condition it’s in. And the fact that it’s in the Cradle makes it even more lamentable.”