Over 130 villages are without water in Ngqushwa

This is the story of about 138 villages scattered around Ngqushwa. Though villages differ on when their taps ran dry, the general agreement is that there has been a water crisis in this town for the past 10 years. Elitsha recently published a story about the lack of access to clean water by villagers in Centane which also falls under the Amathole municipality.

Sipho Majiya is a disabled man from Feni village near Ngqushwa town in the Eastern Cape. He has a standpipe tap in his house but it’s dry, he said, the last time it provided clean water being six years ago.

According to Amathole District Municipality (ADM) spokesperson, Nonceba Madikizela-Vuso, this village is hard hit by illegal water connections and drought. 

Majiya shared his struggle of getting clean water. Despite his disability, he joined a number of protests in the village to demand water but water remains a piped dream. The last protest was in August, led mostly by young people who blocked the dusty streets of the village with burning tyres. Days after the protest, Amathole District Municipality responded by supplying Feni with one water tank. 

According to Majiya, since the water tank was installed in August, the municipality only filled it twice. “They only come once a month,” he said. For elders like Majiya who live alone, a shortage of water is typical as any supply of water runs out before they are able to find someone to assist them.

“This 15,000 litre water tank only lasts for a few hours here; within three hours there’s no water. People come here with big drums some with more than five 20-litre buckets. By the time it’s my turn, water will be finished [and] I will have to go home with those empty buckets,” he said.

“Our municipality does not seem to care,” he said.

Drought has brought on water crises in most parts of the Eastern Cape, but the dam that supplies Ngqushwa and the surrounding villages is full.

Residents said the problem is caused by old pipes that need to be changed and poor planning. Majiya said, “What municipality told us is that when they open water to our taps, the hospital and the town suffers. Meaning if we have water the hospital and the town will be out of water.”

Majiya now relies on rainwater and when it’s not raining he hires someone with a donkey to fetch him water from the river and for that he pays R300. “I only rely on my disability grant now I have to make sure that I have money to buy water,” he said.

There are also trucks that are selling water and for a 25-litre drum they charge from R15 to R20. The water from the river and from the trucks is not clean but Majiya said he has no other option.

In a nearby village in the same ward called Dabhan, more than 400 houses are sharing one standpipe and it was connected by the community.

Resident Nosipho Xabangile said, “To prove that this town has water this tap is never dry. Officials often come here to close it but we know how to open it. As soon as they leave we open it for people to get water,” she said.

Xabangile showed us how to open the tap using a knife to unlock what they call a water station. For safety reasons, Xabangile said people often come at night with bakkies to fetch water.

Athini Ngxumza of Mthaphu Centre, an NGO that focuses on gender-based violence and community development, said they have knocked on many doors asking for help regarding the water crisis in Ngqushwa but with no luck. “This water crisis has been happening for a very long time. During the lockdown, we wrote letters to our municipality, to Premier Oscar Mabuyane’s office, to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s office and to ADM asking for them to intervene in this water crisis but only the president’s office responded then and promised to send someone from the local office but that did not happen. We organised a peaceful march to N2 because no one was responding to our letters but on that day police were quick to respond. By the time we get to N2, police from Mthatha and Bisho were already waiting for us. Six community members were injured and three were arrested. It was only then that the ADM sent an engineer,” said Ngxumza.

She said the engineer told them that the reservoir that is used to pump water to Ngqushwa is very small and can only supply less than 100 houses a day. “That alone tells you that there’s poor planning,” she said. “With the high rate of gender-based violence in the country, women in this village are expected to walk long distances alone to fetch water that is not even clean,” she said.

Qhamani Tshazi, programme officer of development and local governance NGO, Afesis-Corplan, said the scale of the water crisis in the province is huge. He said that the water tanks the district municipality supplies are not enough. “In some villages the water tanks were not delivered; that led to people drinking dirty water with animals,” he said.

The ADM spokesperson, Madikizela-Vuso, said water is carted into the area using three municipal water trucks. She added that the Amathole district is vast and it takes time for a truck to return to the same area delivering water. There are also issues, she said, of the water trucks requiring constant repairs due to bad roads.