“I look after one old lady who was hit by a car in 1996 and is bedridden, she can’t even go and relieve herself. When I go to see her I have to clean her up — I’m using my gloves — and I bath her, I clean her house, cook for her,” says Violet Mthembu (not her real name). She is a home-based care-giver who lives in Nkobongo township, a dilapidated mixture of low-cost housing and shacks about 40km north of Durban and one of the centres of the 2000/01 cholera outbreak in KwaZulu-Natal.
Mthembu, who cares for three people every day, says that many of the sick and aged she looks after are either physically or economically incapable of collecting water from one of the stand pipes dotting the township — the only place where residents can access running water. “Some people have [prepaid] cards, but for others it’s too expensive, so we use our own cards,” she says.
Since 2000, when a concession was awarded to Siza Water (a South African subsidiary of the French-based utility, SAUR), Nkobongo’s water and sanitation services have been provided through a public-private partnership. According to the Municipal Services Project report, Still Paying the Price: Revisiting the Cholera Epidemic of 2000-2001 in South Africa, released this week by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), “the privatisation of water in 2000 under Siza Water meant an end to free water services on the borders of Nkobongo.”
For the community, access to water is gained through prepaid water cards, which are used at communal stand pipes and initially cost R70. The cards can be topped up with R10 and R20 tokens and also register the 200 litres of free water allowed per household per day in accordance with the government’s Free Basic Water policy, which was implemented after the cholera epidemic in 2000.
But in an economically depressed area such as Nkobongo, where unemployment is rife and residents generally find low-paying menial employment as domestic workers in nearby Shakaskraal, or as labourers on the surrounding sugar cane farms, even the initial outlay of R70 can sometimes be too much. “I borrow the card from my neighbours every day. I’m only a poor woman,” says Dudu Mkwanazi, a domestic worker and single mother of three children.
Initially Mkwanazi had a metered yard connection, but she asked that it be disconnected in 2003 after what she felt was an exorbitant increase in her water bill. “There was no connection fee and, at first, I was paying R20, R23 a month. But it kept getting more and more expensive until I was being charged R150 a month, even when we weren’t using that much water. Maybe they were getting back the connection fee with the increases in my account,” she says.
Mkwanazi now borrows a neighbour’s wheelbarrow for the 40minute walk to the nearest stand pipe and back. She — or one of her three children — makes three journeys a day to get water, which they mainly use to fill the cistern in the flush toilet that is no longer receiving piped water.
The HSRC report found that one of the most overlooked aspects of the epidemic was that peri-urban areas, such as Nkobongo, with access to piped water were also prey to cholera.
Reasons cited included the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry’s “unbending” implementation of its cost-recovery policy, which forced poor households to use unsafe sources of water. It also noted the uneven delivery of services in urban areas — using Nkobongo as an example — where refuse was picked up from the low-cost houses, but not neighbouring shacks.
Mthembu says the interruptions in the water supply have become less frequent, but they still occur without warning or explanation: “The last time we didn’t have any water was in March. It was only reconnected four or five days later. We reported it to the councillor and to Siza Water, but we still don’t know why it was cut,” she says.