Makhanda residents’ right to a clean environment, clean water, health, and economic development have been trashed by sewerage infrastructure failure. ActionSA chairperson Michael Beaumont, who made a stop in the town during the party’s recent ‘Shitty Tour’ of broken infrastructure across South Africa, said failures across the provinces were depriving citizens of their constitutional freedoms. He described the combination of road, water reticulation and sewerage degradation as a “trifecta of infrastructure failure”.
Beaumont was accompanied by ActionSA provincial chairperson Athol Trollip, and local ActionSA activists as they visited some of the town’s most foul sewage leaks.
First up was the junction of Currie, Irving and Albany roads where resident Richard Alexander showed them a long-running sewage spill that had combined with a freshwater leak. The two have combined to form a more or less permanent pool below Mary Waters Secondary School, destroying the road in the process.
En route to the hellish spot, the group experienced Ghost Town’s roads, which Trollip described as “completely impassable”.
“The tragedy is that this is not a new phenomenon,” Trollip explained to Beaumont. “This has been going on in Makhanda for years and years and years: the systematic degradation of road, sewerage and water infrastructure.
“That leak coming out [below] Mary Waters Secondary School has been there for years but the Department of Education, the Department of Public Works, the municipality – nobody gives a continental [damn].”
Earlier this month, it was reported that this flows all the way down Albany Road and into a concrete drain, diverted down to the boundary of the Oval sports field at Blackbeard Street. “At night, when the water supply is turned off and the pressure subsides, sewage from Albany road flows directly into the broken pipe and hence into Makana’s water system,” Makana councillor Geoff Embling reported to Ward 4 residents on May 8. Rhodes University Water Testing Laboratory had found high levels of e.coli in water samples from Blackbeard Street the previous week.
Via the other long-running sewage leak under the bridge near Kuyasa Special School, the next stop for the ActionSA team was the Dr Jacob Zuma Drive (Raglan Road) bridge crossing the Matyana River.
“What we’ve got here is a perfect storm,” Trollip said. “Over there is the old sewerage system that is overflowing and pouring into the river. Right next to it [the stream itself] you’ve got a river of raw sewage. And here [right-hand-side of the stream] is the new pipeline that has been built to take sewage from Hooggenoeg into the waste water treatment plant. But it’s not working.”
Approaching the Kuyasa bridge earlier, the tour had driven past a large sewerage maintenance hole. The missing cover meant it was possible to see that no sewage was running through it.
“This can be fixed,” Trollip said. “You can understand why Makhanda residents have had e.coli in their drinking water, because this sewage infiltrates everywhere.”
Trollip also holds the party’s portfolio on land and agriculture.
“Not only does it infiltrate people’s drinking water; it also ends up in the Kowie River, which is a major tourism destination. There’s also a lot of important export agriculture that takes place along this river.
“What’s happening here in Makhanda in this Matyana River is a complete disgrace and it can be fixed. People live here and work here and drive over this bridge every single day and don’t give a continental damn about what’s happening to our health and our environment.
“Every councillor in this municipality gets a salary at the end of the month. Every official in this municipality gets a salary at the end of the month. The politicians and administration of Makana have failed the residents of this town and this municipality dismally. That is why it is so important to vote for political change,” Trollip said.
Describing South Africa’s municipalities as broken, Beaumont added that the sewerage infrastructure failure that they were seeing in many provinces on their tour was a fundamental municipal function that wasn’t being delivered.
“Having municipalities like Makana under administration for so many years is not serving the residents of this community,” Beaumont said. “It’s the soft kind of administration that allows councillors to continue to exist and be remunerated.”
Beaumont said a dysfunctional municipality could not be turned around under administration unless the resources are allocated for that turnaround to happen.
He said another problem was the “buddy-buddy relationship between a provincial government and a municipality led by the same party. “Because actually it’s all about the internal harmony of the ANC, not about the residents of this municipality. We need a new provincial government that kicks the butt of the people who are governing this municipality.
“Everywhere we go, we’ve seen these sorts of sewage infrastructure failures, and we must call them what they are: a deprivation of the constitutional freedoms of South Africans,” Beaumont said. Freedoms like the right to a clean environment, the right to clean water, right to health, right to economic development and agriculture. The Constitution is rendered meaningless by consecutive governments that just continue in this vein.
ActionSA outlines their plan to fix South Africa’s sewage crisis on their website: https://bit.ly/TOTTActionPlan
ActionSA’s plan to fix sewage crisis
In a statement issued this week, ActionSA cited the 2022 Green Drop Report published by the Department of Water and Sanitation showing that 71% of wastewater treatment facilities are in critical condition requiring urgent intervention.
“The fact that over 46% of our groundwater is now contaminated by sewage demonstrates the quantum of the problem and the scale at which municipalities are failing to manage sewage infrastructure,” Beaumont said.
The consequence of this failure had been evident at every turn of the ‘Shitty Tour’ with raw, untreated sewage flowing out of treatment plants that were not operational and into the water courses.
“This pollution has directly impacted on agriculture and irrigation systems, pollutes drinking water and reduces our ocean water quality and associated tourism industry,” Beaumont said.
South Africans faced a national health crisis as a direct consequence of sewage infrastructure failure.
“Communities and interest groups confirmed that people are getting sick at an increasing rate and this problem looks certain to get worse as more communities start to experience the consequence of sewage infrastructure collapse,” Beaumont said.
ActionSA’s Infrastructure Master Plan includes:
Zero-based budgeting that locks down required funding for sewage infrastructure renewal, repairs and maintenance before budgets can look to fund less pressing priorities.
Public private partnerships that leverage the balance sheets of the private sector for initial capital outlays required to expand and renew wastewater treatment facilities.
Municipal oversight to ensure that minimum prescribed levels of spend on sewage infrastructure are required alongside accountability mechanisms for return on investment.
Declare states of disaster in the worst impacted regions to unlock disaster management support to address both the health and infrastructure aspects of the crisis.
Prosecutions of municipal officials by the NPA to ensure people go to jail for criminal pollution of water courses and coastlines.
Protecting wastewater treatment facilities by declaring them national key points; establishing a specialised infrastructure unit in the SAPS bolstered by military deployment to protect these installations.
“ActionSA would amend criminal legislation to declare infrastructure theft or vandalism as a crime of sabotage carrying a mandatory life sentence,” Beaumont said.
- This article was first published in Talk of the Town, 23 May 2024. The newspaper serving the communities of Ndlambe and the Sunshine Coast, with a weekly wrap of Makhanda news, is available at stores from early on Thursdays.
