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Walking for water

Sue Maclennan

LIFELONG LESSON: A Marselle resident and his grandson set off down the road with a bucket of water filled from a communal tank in Marselle on Friday January 26. With tanks scheduled for replenishment during the day when many are at work, it’s often left to the old and the very young to secure the daily supply for households. Pictures: SUE MACLENNAN

Work is under way to alleviate water shortages in wards 3 and 4 – but meanwhile life is very difficult for residents who depend on communal water tanks. Ndlambe Municipality’s response is at the end of this article
“Sometimes it’s 11 or 12 at night and you get woken up by shouting. Then you look out the window and you see it’s people fighting next to the tank.
“You can’t really blame them Just imagine –You get home from work at 7pm, only to find that the tank in your street is completely empty. So you go to the one that is three streets away.
“Empty. Now you are frustrated and very, very tired.
“Then someone tells you they got water earlier from another one – and they direct you. It’s much further. You get there but everyone else has already heard the same thing, so it’s already empty.
“You go home and do your best to wash and feed your family with the five-litre you kept behind the cupboard for an emergency.”
Others have been at home and they’ve been looking out all day for water.
“Now the truck finally comes – 9, 10 o clock at night – so they run to get into the queue so they will at least have water the next day.
“That’s when a fight starts: somebody says they were before you in the queue; somebody says, ‘Wait! That’s my bucket not yours!’
“Somebody says, “But you took water from this tank earlier: you are the one who made it empty in the first place!”
Marselle resident Nozuko Mangani described what she said was an almost nightly occurrence.
Water has become a high-stakes commodity in Marselle and because they fear that speaking out might prejudice them, many of the other people TOTT interviewed asked to remain anonymous. The asterisks indicate that those aren’t their real names.
Boesmansriviermond, Marselle, Klipfontein and Kenton on Sea get their water from boreholes, supplemented with desalinated water through the Albany Coast reverse osmosis (RO) plant at Boesmansriviermond (3.55 megalitres). The 2011 census puts that area’s total population at the time at 11 301. Marselle residents numbered 5,564, comprising 1,810 households.
Right now with nothing but air in the taps, and drought leaving household rainwater tanks empty, communal tanks are the only option for most Marselle residents. Ndlambe Municipaity has distributed around 50 communal water tanks across the township. At a rough estimate, there could be one every third street, meaning a walk of around half a kilometer for those at the “wrong” end of the “wrong” street.
During the hour and a half that Talk of the Town spent in Marselle that Friday, children as young as three and grandfathers as old as three score years and ten carrying bottles, pushing buckets in wheelbarrows passed by. At the tanks that still had water in them, the queues grew.
Khuthala* lives in the Sportsfield informal settlement. By that Friday, there had been no water from the communal tap for a week. The tank closest to her house had been empty for days when the force of a strong wind blowing it over crushed it.
“It can take you a couple of hours to fetch water,” Khuthala said. “Sometimes you’ll go to one tank, find it’s empty, then you go to the next one and maybe even the next one.
“You fill every container you have – but also you can only fill as much as you can carry back home.”
With very drop carried home, it’s almost impossible to wash clothes.
The water tastes bad.
“Sometimes with the right truck – the white Amatola tanker – it’s okay. But it’s not nice to drink and if you can afford to, you rather buy water for drinking.”
Ndlambe Municipality has prioritized water harvesting for new developments and many Marselle homes have rainwater tanks in their yards.
“But rain is scarce and our tanks went dry long ago.”
Every day, Khuthala, who works as a cleaner at a Kenton business has to make sure she’s at the communal tank before 6am.
“Because by the time I come back from work, the water is finished.”
Then sometimes, she says, even that doesn’t help.
“Sometimes the water truck only comes once a week.”
Other residents nod in agreement when Mangani says Marselle hasn’t had water since 2019.
“Since 2019 no water at all,” says pensioner Vuyisile Aja.
A man and his grandson return homewards with a bucket of water filled from a communal tank.
Daily impact
Lindile Ntakana earns a living from a small carwash called Vukuzenzele.
“All I can do now is just wipe the taxis and cars that come here. People come, but now when they see I’ve got no water, they just drive off.”
*Happiness lives in an area on the outskirts of Marselle known as Tyoks with four children and her parents.
“They took the tank that was in my yard for the community,” she said. “It’s small – only 1500 litres. They fill it and after two hours, it’s finished.”
Her parents are frail and unable to fetch water when she’s at work.
*Luyanda, also from Tyoks, keeps five goats and a cow.
“They suffer when there’s no water,” she said. “They wander far, just to find water somewhere.”
*Hope lives in 96 informal settlement.
“Since 2019 the water has been closed,” he says. “They brought tanks in 2022, but the water varies a lot in quality. Sometimes it’s brown and smells very bad.
“Once we found a sanitary pad in the tank near us that someone must have thrown into it. That was when we realised we couldn’t trust that the tank water would always be safe to drink,” Hope said.
“The water is never enough, and it was never said what was the root cause of no water. People just got tenders to buy water trucks and the money was used to keep filling tanks rather than to fix the cause.”
There are 11 people living in Hope’s home. Three are elderly and don’t have the strength to go and collect water. Three are young people who can help, but the rest are small children.
“When I come home from work I have to cook and clean the house, then still go around the location looking for water.”
A woman carrying a bottle of water crosses an open area at Sportsfield informal settlement.
White shirts
*Billy supports two elderly parents and three children in his New Rest home.
“Before this issue, we bought a washing machine. But it’s useless – we can’t use it anymore.”
When schools opened, Billy had to buy 15 white T-shirts.
“Children can’t wear a white shirt twice, so they had to have one for each day,” he said.
His works long hours, leaving before dawn and returning after sunset.
“It means whoever’s let at home must walk for miles just to find water.”
Young children walk to fetch water from a communal tank.
Economic impact
Along with the daily impact on the lives of people who don’t have the resources to buffer themselves against it, the ongoing water outages across Ndlambe were named by local businesses as the single biggest challenge during the crucial tourism season. The 51 respondents to Kenton & Boesmans Chamber of Business and Tourism’s festive season survey bought more than 1.85 million litres of drinking water at a cost of over R550,000 to keep their businesses going.
During the first council meeting of the year, mayor Khululwa Ncamiso emphasised she was acutely aware of the ongoing water outages across Ndlambe.
“Ward 4, in particular, has been completely without water for two weeks,” she said at the January 30 meeting. “We have appointed a contractor who is dealing with the water issues in wards 3 and 4.”
A long queue at a communal tank.
Solutions
Local stakeholders including the municipality saw the handing over of the Bushmans River Mouth reverse osmosis plant to Ndlambe as an important step towards securing a reliable water supply for the area.
Built in 1982 and upgraded at the cost of R18 million for handover in 2019, the Albany Coast RO plant has been operating suboptimally for several years under the stewardship of Amatola Water. Following legal and administrative delays, the plant was finally handed over to Ndlambe Municipality, who appointed Sizwe Amanzi to refurbish, manage production and maintain the plant.
Residents queue late into the night for water from the communal tank.
Poor quality
In a briefing to residents in the Kenton Town Hall on September 29, 2025, Sizwe Amanzi CEO, NJ Bouwer, said the Bushmans RO plant was in a state of disrepair.
“We will do a full refurbishment, but that must be based on a full assessment,” Bouwer said in September.
Their first priority would be to secure the intake system because there was a limited volume of water, of very poor quality coming in. Second, they would replace the inadequate pre-treatment system. Third, the membrane filtration units would be divided into smaller units. That way, when one broke down or needed maintenance, the others could continue to function.
Bouwer emphasised that the parts needed to refurbish the plant were all “long-lead” specialised items.
“We will keep some spares in stock, but having spares for every part would in fact mean having an entire ‘spare’ plant,” Bouwer explained.
Predictive maintenance was part of their strategy to prevent crises.
While reticulation issues (like finding and repairing massive water leaks) wasn’t explicitly part of their initial contract, Sizwe Amanzi had the authority to seek funding to undertake that work, and intended to do so once the priorities outlined above had been addressed.
“The tide does turn,” Bouwer said, referring to the seemingly endless water problems that communities in municipalities face. “Provided there is enough time.”
Sizwe Amanzi would also invest in seeking other water sources, Bouwer said at the September meeting.
“Our primary goal is to drive down the cost of water production [while maintaining quality],” Bouwer said. “The things we are talking about today are not instant.”
ECONOMIC IMPACT: Lindile Ntakana runs a small taxi valet service but with no water at all, the service he can offer is limited and customers go elsewhere.
Citizen engagement
The service Delivery Support Group consisting of the Bushmans Ratepayers Organisation (BRRAG), Kenton-on-Sea Ratepayers Association (KOSRA), Estuary Care and the Kenton & Boesmans Chamber of Business and Tourism forms part of the municipality’s Water Management Committee and Water Technical Task Team. BRRAG says input by this group of volunteers has an important role in achieving long-term water availability for Wards 3&4, including the remedial actions currently under way.

Drought
In the section of Ndlambe’s integrated development plan dealing with risk, 2050 projections predicted that some areas would experience drought. The level of drought in Port Alfred would be high, and in Alexandria and Kenton-On-Sea, extreme.
The IDP sets out mitigation strategies that include water conservation measures, designing a water pressure management system, reducing the contamination of stormwater runoff, maintaining and rehabilitating wetlands, rehabilitating ecosystems and maintaining ecological infrastructure. Additional drought mitigation measures set out in the IDP are managing development within the urban edge; identifying buffer zones; limiting infrastructure development in high-risk areas; enforcing coastal management lines; and maintaining and rehabilitating dunes.
The municipality’s Water Services Development Plan (WSDP), also part of the IDP, outlines a multi-pronged approach to water security. Key interventions include the development of groundwater sources, mobile water carting, installation of static storage tanks, and rainwater harvesting education campaigns.
“Temporary drought measures are being mainstreamed into long-term resilience planning, with continued investment in borehole expansion and the assessment of alternative water sources such as desalination,” the IDP states. “Partnerships with the Department of Water and Sanitation, Sarah Baartman District Municipality, and the Provincial Disaster Management Unit support these efforts. The municipality actively monitors non-revenue water, demand trends, and infrastructure vulnerabilities to improve drought readiness and reduce reliance on emergency supply systems.”
This tank blew over in strong winds when it was empty, and was crushed.
Growing demand, insufficient supply
Ndlambe’s draft annual report for 2024/25, tabled at the January 30 full council meeting, acknowledges that across the municipality, there is insufficient supply quantity to meet the growing demand. Ndlambe’s water conservation and demand management (WCDM) team comprising plumbers and general workers had started piloting the conservation of water in Alexandria, Marselle and Kenton on Sea, the report states.
Drought relief and WCDM projects included refurbishment of the existing water infrastructure such as meter and valve replacement and pump station refurbishment, the report states.
The poor quality of low-cost plumbing in low-cost housing had exacerbated leaks and water losses. To remedy this, the report states, loss control and repairing leaks in indigent households was being done on a wide scale throughout Ndlambe. Moreover, in future low-cost house design, emphasis would be placed on the quality of all water and sanitation fittings.
A resident carries buckets across the veld in the Sportsfield informal settlement.
Where Marselle’s water comes from (Source: 2025/26 IDP)
Kenton-on-Sea and Bushman’s River bulk water is supplied from two sources: beach wells situated in the Bushman’s River Mouth area and a dune well field at Diaz Cross.
Raw saline water is treated with reverse osmosis before being delivered to the main concrete service reservoirs at Kenton-on-Sea.
The municipal water supply grid consists of two interrelated systems: The areas supplied from those main concrete service reservoirs and those supplied from the 80kℓ tower reservoir, situated within the reservoir enclosure.
Areas connected to the tower reservoir include Merry Hill, Ekuphumleni, Norfolk Ridge and the high lying area in the vicinity of Norfolk Ridge.
Two reservoirs in Bushman’s River town are supplied by gravity main from the Kenton-on-Sea reservoirs. The Bushman’s River reservoirs service only the residential area.
The 500kℓ Farm reservoir which is situated 8km from Kenton-on-Sea on the Kenton-Salem Road is supplied from a booster pump station situated alongside the Kenton-Salem Road opposite Merry Hill. This reservoir supplies some farms and small holdings in the local area.
Kenton Eco Estates is serviced by a pump station located in the Kenton-on-Sea reservoir area and is supplied from the main gravity feeder line from the KOS reservoirs. The pumped main is routed along the road reserve north of the R72 in an Easterly direction to Kenton Eco Estates where the pipe crosses the R72 to the development.
A water tanker returns from filling a communal tank in Marselle.
Ndlambe responds to TOTT’s questions about water supply and quality in Marselle
The water supply challenges experienced in Marselle are not isolated, but form part of the broader constraints affecting Wards 3 and 4. The current available water resources are insufficient to meet the total demand within these areas.
As a result of limited supply, high-lying and the furthest sections of Marselle are mainly affected due to inadequate head pressure in the system. To manage the shortfall and ensure equitable distribution of the available water, the Municipality has implemented water rationing measures aimed at supplying as many areas as possible within the constraints of the system.
Ndlambe Local Municipality has finalised the transfer of the Bushmans River reverse osmosis (RO) plant from Amatola Water, in partnership with the appointed service provider, Sizwe Amanzi. This transfer enables the Municipality to exercise direct operational control and implement corrective measures to stabilise and improve water production, however, meaningful improvements will take time. The RO plant requires significant capital investment and refurbishment to restore it to optimal operating capacity. The Municipality is actively working towards securing the necessary interventions to improve reliability and output over the medium to long term.
There are approximately 50 communal water tanks strategically distributed throughout Marselle. These tanks were installed to provide residents with access to water during periods of rationing and supply interruptions.
The population of Marselle is estimated to be between 5,500 and 6,000 residents.
Water carting operations are actively managed by the Municipality, with municipal-owned and contracted water tankers deployed to refill communal tanks as and when required.
Due to fluctuating consumption patterns and varying depletion times across different locations, there is no fixed or static roster for Marselle. Tanks are filled on an as-needed basis to ensure responsiveness to real-time conditions.
Residents are typically informed of operational updates through the Ward Councillor, community communication platforms, and official municipal notices issued during supply disruptions.
The deployment and monitoring of water tankers is overseen by Ndlambe Local Municipality. Supervision is conducted by the Water Services management team and designated operational supervisors, who are responsible for coordinating municipal and contracted drivers to ensure compliance and service delivery.
Water delivered by tankers is sourced from available municipal supply points with sufficient capacity at the time of collection. These may include:
The Municipality continuously monitors source availability to ensure that potable water is supplied in compliance with applicable standards.

– Ndlambe Municipality

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