Residents of Chavani and surrounding villages in the Vhembe district of Limpopo are still without running water, despite a R486-million water system having been built in the area.
Responding to questions, Vhembe District Municipality spokesperson Moses Shibambu said the water system project started in 2022 and was completed in November 2025, but because of vandalism and insufficient water availability, it is not yet operational.
Testing will be completed by the end of May, he said. He did not respond to follow-up questions on when families would start receiving water.
When GroundUp visited the site earlier this month, the project – intended to serve 40,981 households – did not appear to be complete. There are new reservoirs and pies, but only a few communal standpipes have been installed, and these have been vandalised.
Residents say they are still relying on alternative water sources. “I use my SASSA grant money to buy water,” said Grace Rikhotso from Bungeni, one of the villages covered by the system. “We are tired of the government. I will not vote in the coming election because I don’t believe anything will change. They damaged our streets and never fixed the roads. How do we push wheelbarrows [with water] now?”
Many residents travel several kilometres with wheelbarrows to buy water per container.
“They just use our village name for the project, but our people are not benefiting,” said Chavani Chief Sikheto Thomas Mukari.
Project steering committee chairperson Vonani Khorombi said there were no working standpipes. “They told us the project is at 100%, but it was not handed over to the community.”
Shibambu did not respond to questions about the lack of standpipes.
The original budget for the project, funded through the Municipal Infrastructure Grant, was R318-million, but it was later increased to R486 million. R482-million has been spent to date, said Shibambu.
The Department of Water and Sanitation website attributes the increase in costs to inflation, fuel price increases and exchange rate fluctuations. Also, there were differences between engineers’ estimates and contractor pricing during the tender process, with bids varying significantly from initial estimates.
Published with Limpopo Mirror
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Lack of participation in governance: Limited opportunities for citizens to participate in decision-making.
Jk Friend
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.
Blistered Outlaw
Jislaaik – an expression of surprise [yis-liike] This is usually said when trying to express surprise or wonder.Example: “Jislaaik, you gave me a fright!”