Residents of Town Two in Khayelitsha blocked roads at the weekend, demanding electricity, water and better sanitation.
- Parts of Khayelitsha can’t be serviced properly by City of Cape Town sanitation teams because of high crime rates, says the City.
- Residents protested at the weekend demanding electricity, water and better sanitation.
- The City says sanitation teams must be accompanied by security escorts which are not always available.
- Taps are to be installed from this month.
City of Cape Town sanitation teams are unable to service parts of Khayelitsha promptly because of high crime rates, the City has confirmed.
Mayoral Committee Member for Water and Sanitation Zahid Badroodien told GroundUp that “due to the safety risk in Khayelitsha, City teams can only access the area with security escorts who need to be arranged to safeguard teams while they are working on site”.
“This unfortunately means that City teams are not necessarily able to attend to service requests as soon as they would like.”
Badroodien was responding to questions from GroundUp following a protest on Saturday in which residents of Level Two informal settlement barricaded Walter Sisulu Road near Khayelitsha Mall with burning tyres. The protest disrupted traffic, delaying taxi services and blocking access to the mall.
The protesters were demanding electricity, water and better sanitation. The settlement is on land owned by the City.
The residents rely on water taps they installed themselves in 2021. But the supply is erratic.
“Because of low pressure, our taps don’t produce water during the daytime when everybody uses water,” said Mabhelandile Twani, chairperson of land occupiers’ organization Intlungu Yabahlali Basematyotyomben.
Badroodien said plans were in place to install 80 taps in the settlement, starting in April. Additional toilets would be installed in the 2025/26 financial year, which starts in July, he said.
Twani said the chemical toilets “strip us of our dignity”. The City struggles to maintain these toilets, he said. “The cleaning company doesn’t always come because Law Enforcement is not available to escort them.”
Badroodien said the last toilet service in the area was conducted on Friday, 28 March. Responding to a complaint expressed by protesters that the contracted cleaning company had asked residents to clean their own toilets because there was no water, Badroodien said water was not necessary for the suction of waste from the chemical toilets. The toilets were cleaned by janitors, he said.
On the protesters’ demand for electricity, Mayco member for Human Settlements Carl Pophaim said the City would conduct a survey of the settlement to count the homes. “The City will then send that information to Eskom for application of funds and approval.”
Many households resort to illegal electricity connections from nearby formal houses, Chuma Primary School, or streetlights. However, not everyone can afford the necessary wiring.
“Almost half of the residents staying here have no electricity because they are too poor to buy wires,” Twani explained.
Those without illegal connections rely on rechargeable lamps and candles. “We want to get electricity legally because heavy rains damage our illegal connections and leave us without power,” said Twani. “We are willing to pay for electricity.”
Ayema Bhadashe, who lives with her husband and three children, said she pays R200 a month to a nearby house for electricity. But thieves frequently steal the electrical wires, leaving the family without electricity for two to three weeks.
Bhadashe has to wait for her children’s social grants before she can replace the wires. “Sometimes they steal the wires when I don’t have money for paraffin and candles, so I don’t cook,” she added.
She also claimed that criminals demand protection fees from residents who connect to Eskom wires. “They say they are guarding our electrical wires and preventing other thugs from stealing them, and they make residents pay R150 monthly.”
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Tin Fox
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.
Willow Dragon
Hayibo! – wow! [Hai-bo] Derived from the Zulu word meaning “definitely not!” This word is usually expressed on its own, at the start or end of a sentence when something seems incredible.Example: “Hayibo! Ha! Ha! I can’t believe that!”