Chaos as Joburg Water tries to remove illegal connections
Residents of Phumla Mqashi informal settlement chase away technicians
Chaos erupted at the Phumla Mqashi informal settlement near Lenasia, Johannesburg, on Tuesday as angry residents chased away Joburg Water technicians who had come to remove illegal water connections.
In a statement, Joburg Water spokesperson Nombuso Shabalala said the connections posed “substantial challenges” to the municipality’s water network, and contributed greatly to water losses and shortages across the city.
According to Joburg Water, the community doesn’t have formal water infrastructure. There used to be water tanks but “due to the ongoing land invasions and subsequent illegal water connections, these tanks were vandalised, leading to increased strain on the local water supply network”, Joburg Water said in a statement.
Angry protesters blocked roads into Lenasia, including the busy Golden Highway, to stop technicians escorted by police from entering. Technicians eventually managed to get through the crowd and removed some illegal connections but they were soon forced to leave again.
Stones were thrown and GroundUp saw officers firing rubber bullets to disperse the crowd. The protesters then went to shops in the area to force them to close. A few delivery trucks coming to the shopping centre were told to turn around and park elsewhere.
Protesters say the settlement was established in 2016 but is still without running water or electricity.
“We know we connected water illegally but they [the City] should have warned us they were going to disconnect,” said one of the residents who asked not to be named. She said if taps were installed, residents would be prepared to pay for water. “We have young kids who have to eat. How are they going to do that if there is no water? There is no life without water,” she said.
Resident Nhunhu Khoza said those whose illegal connections were removed on Tuesday could pay between R350 and R700 and be reconnected before the end of the day. “Sometimes even the Joburg Water officials connect us,” she claimed.
Another resident, Nhlanhla Moneri, said households had been connected illegally since 2017.
“They only disconnect today so they can bring us water trucks because this is how their comrades can benefit,” said Moneri.
Next: SRD R370 grant beneficiaries approved in October still waiting for payment
Previous: How people in Namaqualand are keeping the Nama language alive
© 2024 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.