Ongoing battle to get clean water in Butterworth

As she filled her 20 litre bucket with water gushing from a broken pipe, Thina* tried hard not to slip on the embankment and nosedive into the deep ditch near the informal settlement she lives in.

The 16-year-old who lives with her mother, grandmother and two siblings, called collecting water “an extreme sport”. The water she and other residents of Santini in Butterworth (also called eGcuwa) in the Eastern Cape is a few metres away from a sewage plant.

In 2011, the residents took matters into their own hands and each family contributed what they could afford to connect to the main municipal infrastructure to access clean water. But a year later, the Mnquma local municipality dismantled the connection. 

“Unfortunately, all of us here regularly get sick from the water. Severe diarrhoea is a regular occurrence for us here in Santini. We have gotten used to it by now,” said Nosakhele Majiki, a leader in Santini’s street committee. 

“When we go to the hospital, the health workers there tell us what we already know – it is the contaminated water that is making us all ill,” she told Mail & Guardian.

“We have been trying to connect our own water for the past 10 years. But we do not have running water anymore because the pipe we used to connect ourselves to the water supply has been cut. 

“We got tired of walking more than 5km with heavy containers to fill water for our household as well as drinking needs,” Majiki added.

The painful memory of those days of carrying heavy buckets for long distances is etched on her face. That was the reason the Santini residents had decided to connect to the municipal supply, Majiki said.

“The municipality then decided to cut off our water, without providing any reasons for stopping our water supply. We then had to revert back to getting water from a place called Judges [in Butterworth],” she explained. 

“Then the main water pipe near the bridge, which is also connected to the main sewer line, burst, letting out an endless amount of water. That is where we get our water from now.” 

She said Santini residents had tried to install water pipes again after the municipality had cut them off, but that proved unsuccessful. 

“We again started to collect R5 per household in order to buy new taps and water pipes. Unfortunately, we don’t have someone here in Santini to connect the pipes and taps for us. 

“We will have to wait until the money rises quite a bit to find someone outside to do the connections for us,” she said, adding that the residents had managed to collect more than R500 towards the cause.

The health hazard endured by the residents — who moved to Santini from different parts of the Eastern Cape from around 2004 — could have been avoided.

The M&G reported in July last year that the national human settlements department had squandered R270 million that was meant to improve the lives of the 39 220 families living in dilapidated corrugated iron homes – as well as formalising informal areas in the province.

Amathole district municipality, under which the Mnquma municipality and Butterworth fall, was meant to have also benefited from the funds, with R78.1 million having been budgeted to formalise communities such as Santini. 

The funds were forfeited — as confirmed by the parliament’s human settlements committee — after Tabisa Poswa, the head of the Eastern Cape human settlements department, selected dysfunctional municipalities as “implementing agents” for the project, resulting in the national department taking the funds back and stopping the project. 

Poswa told the M&G there was nothing wrong with her intention to use municipalities, instead of the provincial government as per the business plan, to implement the housing formalisation programme. 

“It is also necessary to point out that there is nothing sinister about the utilisation of municipalities as implementing agents. The discussions in this regard in the provincial government have been ongoing since the latter part of 2020, and there was broad agreement at the highest levels of government that this was the appropriate mechanism to expedite service delivery,” she argued.

Majiki said the people of Santini did not know that they were earmarked for development.

“The municipality is aware of our plight, but I don’t think they care about it because they have not done anything after disconnecting our makeshift pipes,” she said.

Majiki spoke of the dangers for women and children trying to fill buckets or do their laundry with the water from the burst pipe, which runs along a bridge over an old, unused railway line that separates the residential area from the main town.

“That place is very hazardous because the bridge is slippery and there have been incidents of people falling off the bridge,” Majiki said, the deep concern evident in her tone.

“Many people have slipped and fallen on the bridge, breaking limbs in the process. Last year, we had to retrieve a girl’s body. The girl had slipped and fallen into the ditch, where she died.

“We would really appreciate it if the municipality could install and connect at least two communal taps in our settlement for us to be able to get clean water, without the hazard of standing near the embankment. 

“You need to understand that the sewer line is also broken here, and the sewage water mixes with the municipal water. All of this is really painful for us,” she added.

“To be honest, we have lost all hope in the municipality because it has been ages since we have had to contend with our dire water situation. That is why we tried to collect [money from] our measly incomes to try and get some clean water, before that was taken away.” 

The M&G sent detailed questions to the Mnquma municipality on 12 December, and made subsequent phone calls for comment, but had not received any by the time of writing.

* Not her real name