Traffic came to a standstill in Vhembe district when ELF-South Africa members painted the street white with their t-shirts marching to the municipality to deliver a memorandum of demands on Thursday morning.
Residents are demanding water from the Vhembe district municipality.
Disgruntled Vhembe District residents outlined a memorandum of grievances to their local municipality regarding the shortage of water in their district.
The march was led by ELF-South Africa president Hulisani Mani and NEC members including the young people across of Vhembe.
Their memorandum was received by Councilor Samuel Munyai, who is the MMC for technical services.
When the residents presented their memorandum, the municipality’s Council meeting was in progress.
“There are couple of areas that haven’t had water for a long time for over ten to fourteen years and it is clear that the municipality doesn’t have a will or plan to remedy the situation,” said Hulisani Mani president of the Economic Liberators Forum of South Africa (ELF-SA).
“There needs to be interim measures to fix the infrastructure because they have not maintained it for over ten years now,” he said.
“People can’t wait for another ten years to have access to water, but what we are saying is that they must install boreholes and storage tanks in all wards in the area,” he said.
“The boreholes that we need won’t cost more than R80 000, but we know that the municipality spends over a million rand for just one borehole,” said Mani.
“What we are saying to the municipality is that this must not be taken as an opportunity to steal or loot, they must put in place interim measures so that people can have access to water, that’s our demand,” said Mani.
“We are giving them until the 5th of June to meet our demands and this must not be interpreted as an impulse for the elections because even after the elections, we are going to mobilise the community again to push for our demand to be met with proper feedback and a practical plan on how they are going to implement that plan,” said Mani.
“You have a village like Sawu which hasn’t had water for over ten years, and we also have a village like Swinga which has not had water for over eight years,” said Mani.
“In Vhembe we don’t have a problem of water because what we have here is poor management as the municipality has not maintained the existing infrastructure,” said Mani.
“In other areas of the country when a community doesn’t have water for only two weeks it makes headlines in the media” he said.
“It is sad that thirty years into our democracy we are still discussing the issue of people not having access to water,” said Mani.
Mani emphasised that though the municipality says eighty percent of the residents have water the reality is that they have put in place taps across the whole region, but those taps don’t produce water.
“This is not an election ploy as we can’t politicise the issue of water and we have invited all political parties and civic organisations to join us in this march and after the election we will come back here,” said Mani.
Mani called on all South Africans to organise themselves because it can’t be that few politicians who have been deployed to the municipality can’t render services for which they get paid,” he said.
“All that they do is to fight among them as to which contractor must be appointed and the money allocated to them ends up going back to the national Treasury,” explained Mani.
“The residents’ memorandum will be given to the executive mayor and after sitting with the mayoral committee the municipality shall respond,” said Councilor Samuel Monyai who received the memorandum on behalf of the municipality.
Monyai blamed illegal water connections and loadshedding for the shortage of water crisis in Vhembe district.