Thutha Ma-bucket!

‘The smell my brother, the smell. My relatives from Jo’burg can’t visit me anymore because they dread staying in shit,” says a distraught Linda Dlamini (40).

Dlamini lives in a leaky one-roomed shack in Ezenzeleni township, on the outskirts of Warden in the Free State. He has stayed in this shack for more than 10 years, waiting patiently for his RDP house application to be approved. Warden, one of the least developed towns in the Free State, is home to thousands of people who use bucket systems.

Last June during an imbizo, President Thabo Mbeki promised a crowd of Ezenzeleni residents that all bucket-system toilets would be substituted with sewerage toilets by end of 2006, a year ahead of the ANC’s national schedule for the system to be eradicated by 2007.

Ten months after the presidential imbizo thousands of residents continue still use bucket toilets. The affected community does not have a clue when proper sewerage facilities will be installed. Community members claim that, to date, no officials from the Phumelela local municipality have addressed them about the delay.

‘We were fooled by the president’s visit last year. Everybody thought things would be fine by December, but even today nothing has changed for us,” says unemployed mother of three, Lolo Tsotetsi (28). ‘The whole place smells and is a threat to everybody’s health, especially small children,” she says.

Ezenzeleni, according to Jesse Meyer (45), is a ‘kak place” where government treats people like animals. ‘People here no longer worry about the shit buckets; instead they worry about where they are going to rest their heads,” she says. Meyer lives in a rented RDP house, for which she pays the owner R60 a month. She applied for an RDP house in 1996, but there has been no response to her application yet. ‘You tell me. Why should I whine about the stinking toilet when I don’t have a house?” she says.

For physically handicapped pensioner, Thomas Twala (59) development in Warden died with the apartheid government. He says most of the problems they have now were never heard of in ‘the olden days of the boers”. ‘Imagine a crippled old man like me relieving myself in that bucket. It is chaos because I need to be accompanied there always. Not to mention unhygienic,” says Twala.

Dlamini has resorted to only using the toilet at night because he cannot bear the sight of the buckets and the flies, but says he has filtered the smell because ‘I live on it, I eat on it and sleep on it”. ‘You should come on the days the buckets are all lined up for collection in the street and see for yourself. The whole township smells like hell, it is hard to open up your mouth. Flies, sies! This is the home of flies.”

Despite the thousands of people still using bucket systems in Ezenzeleni’s Scoppers section, moves by government to eradicate the system are evident. Of the township’s three sections, two have been provided with sewerage system toilets, although some remain unfinished. Residents in the inner township say the process of eradicating the bucket systems started in June last year, but no one knows what the reasons are for the delay.

Spaza shop owner Phakathi Mnguni (29) says he worked in the municipal projects to erect new toilets for a period of six months. He says when the contracts ended in November, the contracts were not renewed but some toilets officially started operating on December 22 last year.

‘My family’s toilet is fine and I am happy that in the end our wishes were fulfilled. But I still worry about people living in the RDP section. For how long should they wait to get better services? It’s been too long and I am afraid there will be hell soon,” says Mnguni.

For young people like Mnguni and Tsotetsi the bucket system is only one of their many problems. Tsotetsi believes that the historical background of Warden is the reason behind unemployment, poor infrastructure, teenage pregnancy and poor municipal services. Mnguni is of the view that the current dispensation is betraying its voters. ‘We’ve tried talking to the municipality but you can’t keep on translating Sotho to a Sotho speaker. We complained and I think they heard us. What more can we do?”