Mokgolobotho residents are still without water despite protests
After protests in August, Mokgolobotho residents in ward 17 in the Greater Tzaneen Municipality (GTM) were promised that their problems would be attended to after a meeting with the executive mayor of the Mopani District Municipality (MDM), the water authority in the region, Pule Shayi.
“Our water tanks are filled through a booster pump at the reservoir at Bindzulani,” said Frans Mothokoe, chairperson of the Mokgolobotho community group. We were told that the only way the reservoir will fill up was to remove all of the illegal connections. He said they complied but still had no water.
“We were then told by the the MMC for infrastructure development at MDM, Masilo Maloko, that the booster pump is damaged. “We want to understand how it is possible that despite the illegal connections, we used to have water,” he said. He added that they were promised water tanks, but at times three weeks go by without any water delivered.
“We were told that we would get a truck with a water tank once a week. They said that each household would receive three big drums of water and the trucks would go back and forth until the whole area is covered but to our surprise, only one truck came and could not provide water for even half of the Mokgolobotho houses. It compelled us to buy water.” He said that MDM instructed the ward councillor, Lucky Masinge, to report back to them but that has not happened.
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“Even when we have meetings and ask him to attend, he rarely does, and if he does, he avoids the purpose of the meeting. We really want the water issue to be resolved because we are suffering as a community,” he said. MDM spokesperson, Odas Ngobeni, said that for now, water tanks are the only solution they have. “There’s ongoing work to ensure that we deliver water consistently to the community of Mokgolobotho and so far they have been very supportive of such efforts.
“This work includes removing illegal connections on the bulklines. Our commitment was that we will through the coordination of GTM be providing water tankers while the work is ongoing. We have also detected that there is a problem at the booster pump station which we are currently attending to. We hope that once that is addressed and water is pumped to the reticulation system, it would offer us sufficient insight into what needs to happen going forward in our continued efforts to ensure that we deliver water to the community as a short-term intervention. We have explained to the community that the long-term solution is phase 5 of the Ritavi 2 Water Scheme project,” he said.
