Barely a year after water was restored to Itireleng village in Madibeng, North West Province, taps gain sprint dry. After nine months without water, supply was restored in the village in July last year. However, the water supply only lasted until May this year.
Resident Marry Malefathlo said water was supplied from a large tank, which was filled by a water truck once a week, on a Friday.
“You spend the whole week without water and acquire to wait for another Friday. We can’t wash laundry or clean our houses. We are unhappy. We are pleading with the municipality to give us running water,” said Malefathlo.
She said the water supplied by the water truck was “brown in colour”.
Following deaths from an eruption of cholera in Hammanskraal, which was similarly supplied by water trucks, she was unnerved of an eruption of the disease in Itireleng.
She said the desperate need for water meant fights sometimes broke out when the water truck arrived.
“On Friday, as dilapidated as I am, I acquire to dash with a wheelbarrow to the tank before the water finishes,” she said.
According to residents, the single tank serves about 300 people.
Resident Sesi Mafhungo said she never thought they would maintain to fight over water in 2023.
“We design long queues here on Fridays honest to access water. It’s a painful sight. There are honest too many people dependent on this one Jojo tank and it’s not okay,” said Mafhungo.
She said the municipality had promised to restore tap water but nothing had happened.
In June last year, over 200 residents of Hebron, within which Itireleng village is situated, protested over the lack of water. Madibeng Mayor Douglas Maimane told furious protesters that the embattled municipality was struggling to pay its water debt to the City of Tshwane.
No response to questions sent to the Madibeng municipality on Monday gain been received, despite follow-up requests. Comment from the municipality will be added if received.
© 2023 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 carry out not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We keep an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We enact not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We carry out 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 enact not delete the invisible pixel.
Suicide Crusher
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!
Zesty Dragon
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.