Serge Simbini from Willow Farm in Pretoria walks five kilometres to buy water from a household with a tap.
Serge Simbini has to walk five kilometres from Willow Farm in Mamelodi, Pretoria, to Nellmapius to buy water from a household with a tap. He pays R5 for 20 litres. He uses the water to cook, drink and wash. For washing clothes, he fetches dirty water from the Jukskei River.
“The municipality gave us one water tank, put it on an open field in front of our homes, and delivered water into it once a week. The tank was stolen early this year,” said Puseletso Maimela, an unemployed, single mother of three.
She also buys water from a household in Nellmapius, using her children’s social grant. “The amount of water I can afford to buy is not enough for all our needs,” she says.
GroundUp visited Willow Farm on 16 January. The streets are too narrow for cars. There is no formal water or electricity supply. There are no toilets and families use an open field. The municipality had promised them chemical toilets, residents told GroundUp.
A resident, who asked not to be named, said he and a group of more than 20 illegally connected their homes to water and electricity in 2022. But the water supply broke down a year ago. The electricity was working but was “unreliable”, he said.
“Some electric wires and poles fall onto the street. People who have installed these live electric wires and poles do not fix them. Many people live in fear of being shocked.”
The area is on a flood line and some residents, like Isaac Mogola, lost their shacks in floods in October 2019. Mogola rebuilt on the same spot. “There is no other land where I could build,” he said.
Mogola said the municipality had promised to relocate the Willow Farm residents and had moved some. “But we are still here,” he said.
Residents of other flood-prone areas in Mamelodi were relocated to Nellmapius in August 2024, prompting protests by Willow Farm residents and people living in formal houses nearby. At the time, City of Tshwane spokesperson Lindela Mashigo said the flood victims would be moved permanently to Pienaarspoort, starting last November.
In September 2023, Mashigo told GroundUp that R369-million had been set aside for servicing and relocating informal settlements, particularly flood-prone ones.
GroundUp sent questions about Willow Farm to Mashigo last week. The media team acknowledged receipt and promised to respond. GroundUp has still not received a response.
Families use the bushes as a toilet.
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.
Dewdrop Doll
Fun South African Fact: Lions, elephants and giraffes may not roam the city streets, but nature and animals are never too far away in South Africa. From vervet monkeys swinging through tree-lined streets in the suburbs and baboons frolicking around Cape Point to seals visiting the Hout Bay harbour in search of a fishy snack and an array of bird species taking to the sky at any given moment. Wildlife is all around!
Wonder Lady
Braai – a barbecue [brr-rye] Also known as a barbecue where steak, lamb chops and of course ‘boerewors’ is cooked on a grid over wood and flames. Add some salads, rolls and ‘melktert’ for dessert and you are set for a traditional South African braai.