Informal settlement residents destroy sewage pump station
They threaten to prevent repairs to the station until their electricity is restored
The destroyed sewage pump station at New Monwabisi Park. Photo: Vincent Lali
A sewage pump station in Khayelitsha was destroyed days after Eskom and law enforcement officials removed illegal connections from a substation on the same premises. Residents of Mitchells Plain will experience sewage overflows as a result, the City of Cape Town said in a statement.
The City is offering a R100,000 reward for information on the incident.
The destruction of the pump station follows a protest on Friday by people from Vosho informal settlement in New Monwabisi Park. They had blocked Swartklip Road with burning tires to protest the removal of their illegal connections from the substation.
Later, the residents reconnected to the substation, prompting Eskom to switch it off. This then led to the shack dwellers destroying the pump station, according to community leader Donavan Koopman.
When GroundUp went to the site on Sunday, the contents of the pump station had been removed. Raw sewage was streaming out of the station.
Koopman said the City will only be allowed to fix the pump station if Vosho residents are allowed to reconnect their electricity to the substation.
The South African Police Services and Eskom had not commented at the time of publication.
Support independent journalism
Donate using Payfast
Don't miss out on the latest news
We respect your privacy, and promise we won't spam you.
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.