Shack dwellers from Khayelitsha protest in Cape Town

Scores of fed-up Khayelitsha residents demonstrated outside the Civic Centre and demanded that the City of Cape Town provide basic services in their areas.

The protesters, mainly from informal settlements which were established or grew during the Covid-19 lockdown, carried placards that read, “We want electricity” and “We are tired of being lied to”, and shouted for the Cape Town mayor to come out.

Qandu-Qandu community leader Zukiswa Nonkwali said shack dwellers battle to get water in the informal settlement as about 5,000 families share four water taps. “At 6 a.m., I load containers into a wheelbarrow, push it to water taps near Spine Road and return home exhausted at 2 p.m.,” she said. Nonkwali stores the water in containers but cannot take the chance to give it to her two kids to drink if it has stood for too long.

The shortage of taps prevents the shacks dwellers from putting out fires, she said and the lack of roads prevents emergency services from entering Qandu-Qandu. “When residents are sick or injured, we must take them to an ambulance on Spine Road because ambulances can’t enter our area,” she said. “Shacks burn completely because firefighters can’t go into our areas and douse fires.” Forensic officers have also struggled to enter the area and collect dead bodies.

Island community leader, Akhona Tshiki said the lack of street lights in the settlement allows criminals to operate freely. “We can’t go to the shops because we get robbed or raped because it’s dark outside,” she said.

Tshiki said the lack of electricity forces shack dwellers to connect illegally to the grid. “The illegal connections cause our shacks to burn. We use candles to light our shacks, but we struggle to get money to buy them,” she said.

About 8,000 families rely on five taps in Island by her estimation. “We now spend our grant monies to buy pipes to install water taps inside our shacks because there are no taps in some streets,” she said.

Tshiki said the shack dwellers want the city to give them at least 50 more taps. “Remember, we must wash hands after using mshengus, so there must be taps in all streets,” she said. About 20 families use one portable toilet (mshengu) to relieve themselves, she estimated. “When the toilets become full, our kids struggle to find a place to relieve themselves,” she added.

Siyakhana community leader, Nomhle Nyathela said about 320 families share 18 chemical toilets in Siyakhana. “Sometimes the company cleaning the toilets don’t take them away and clean them and say they don’t have water at the depot,” she said. “Now, because we shit in dirty toilets, we have infections.”

Many workers who lost their sources of income during the Covid-19 lockdown could no longer afford rent and occupied land to build themselves houses. These informal settlements do not have basic services. Photo by Mzi Velapi

The shack dwellers’ memorandum reads: “For the past seven years, we have been forced to live without access to basic services, despite repeated promises from the city officials that funding has been allocated to provide water, sanitation and electricity.”

The shack dwellers demand access to clean water and “proper and dignified sanitation”. Long walks to water taps present “a health and safety risk, especially for women, children and the elderly.” The memorandum says they are “forced to use unsafe and undignified makeshift solutions due to the city’s failure to provide adequate toilets”.

The memorandum calls upon the city to provide “formal housing to replace shacks or overcrowded structures and for the City to introduce urgent flood migration measures”, as “every year, homes in Khayelitsha are destroyed due to heavy flooding”.

City of Cape Town community liaison officer, Xolani Joja tried to collect the memorandum, but the shack dwellers refused to hand it to anyone other than Cape Town mayor, Geordin Hill-Lewis.