Thamsanqa D Malinga
Cape Town - Lest we forget, the residents of Ficksburg in the Free State marched because of the lack of service delivery. Among their demands was the basic need for water.
The police were unleashed by the ANC-led municipality, a shot rang out, and a blood-stained Andries Tatane’s image flashed in media reports.
Tatane succumbed to close-range gunshots. It was 2011. He would become a symbol of post-apartheid brutality against a people marching and demanding the bare minimum from the government that they had democratically elected.
Tatane’s widow would later pass on in 2017, without seeing the fruits of what her husband had died for.
When interviewed by journalist Sipho Madondo about the lack of water in Ficksburg, then-mayor and an ANC deployee Mbothoma Maduna without remorse sarcastically responded: “People say there is no water in this town. What is this?” He said this as he giggled and reached into his office fridge for bottles of Valpre mineral water. Valpre is bottled water from the well-known softdrink bottler Coca-Cola.
It sounds like a plot from a despotic movie, doesn’t it?
Well, it did indeed take place here, in South Africa, under the rule of the so-called “people’s movement”, the ANC. I am revisiting the story of Tatane because of what has been happening in Hammanskraal, north of Pretoria.
At the time of writing, about 17 people have died of cholera from drinking contaminated water.
In case you think this is a sudden outbreak, let me tell you now that it is not. Hammanskraal did not come by stealth. The water situation in the township has persisted for 10 years, if not more. So much for the promises of “a better life for all” and “a good story to tell”, which the ANC government has been preaching in its electioneering over the years.
Seventeen people are dead, that we know. And because it’s called a cholera outbreak, something with the potential to spread quickly, it calls for ministerial press conferences, “action committees and investigations”.
How many more deaths are unaccounted for, of those who died of thirst and other diseases that could not be classified and closely linked to this neglect? If ANC councillors could unleash the police to shoot
Tatane in broad daylight, then the people of Hammanskraal dying of thirst are nothing in the broader scheme of things. Let’s tell the truth.
Hammanskraal is the straw that broke the camel’s back. The scandal that helped shine the light on the neglect of the poor.
Its advantage is that it falls under one of the biggest metros in the country – the capital city. Imagine the plight of those in far-flung rural areas.
Commenting on the issue of water, Masala Rabulana, a resident of Nzhelele in the northern and rural part of Venda, Limpopo, wrote on Twitter: “My village (Nzhelele) water infrastructure was also upgraded when Venda was still a Republic and water shortage started on 1996 and still not resolved now, community has accepted that water is delivered by water entrepreneurs or you have borehole.”
This is not far-fetched. It is something I have witnessed in the rural village of Mabheleni in Whittlesea in the Eastern Cape. In 2021, the little town experienced its worst drought. I saw livestock collapsing and dying. Four villages were relying on one tap that was 5km or so away. The only reason the tap had water was because it was on a pipeline that was passing through as it was supplying water to the prison on the other side of the mountain. I saw people praying for rain so that they could fill their water tanks.
The ANC-led municipality did not come to the party (pun intended). Well, perhaps they would have come if it were an alcohol-infused party where tenders were discussed and money exchanged hands.
I remember how, after coming back to Johannesburg, my brother-in-law called me to tell me he was so thirsty he went to drink water at a nearby dam.
By the way, the dam does not supply water to the villages. When water is needed by the nearby farmers, the dam gates are opened and water flows through Krall River to farms that are towards Queenstown.
This is the story of many rural towns.
Ask every villager north of Hammanskraal towards Limpopo. Ask villagers in the Eastern Cape, Free State, the Northern Cape, North West and KwaZulu-Natal.
Water has become a tenderpreneur scheme at the hands of the ANC, hence it gave its benefactor, whose experience in the field is questionable, a contract that was close to R300 million for the Rooival Wastewater Treatment Plant, in Pretoria.
The cadres dare not take responsibility for their graft but are quick to pass the buck (having pocketed other big bucks), and just like they killed Tatane, they are prepared to have casualties along the way.
Hammanskraal is nothing new, many South Africans have been dying and will continue to die of thirst and other diseases, albeit unreported.
In another bizarre incident, last month, as government departments were closing their financial year-end, the mayor of Madibeng issued an apology for his municipality returning R146m to the Treasury. The money was meant for service delivery.
They didn’t care – they had managed to pilfer whatever they could and didn’t know what to do with the rest. People’s needs did not matter.
Let’s do an audit of the rural villages in Madibeng and see if people have water.
The results would be heartbreaking. Most probably, villagers share drinking streams with animals, yet money was sent back to the Treasury.
The ANC rules. The ANC leads. As we head to 2024, we should look at the derelict state of our country. The crumbling infrastructure, the grid that is heading for collapse, the water issues of Hammanskraal and other areas, as well as the unchecked avarice.
We should look at all this and then ask ourselves: What country do we want post 2024?
Do we want to die for a basic human right such as water, or do we want to reap the fruits of our hard-earned democracy?
Lest we forget, they shot Tatane who led a march for water. The deaths at Hammanskraal mean nothing to the ANC and its greedy cadres.
Malinga is a director at Mkabayi Management Consultants, a columnist, political commentator and the author of “Blame Me on Apartheid” as well as “A Dream Betrayed.”
Cape Times