The IRR has come out to recognize what has become a seemingly never ending nightmare and a disaster in most parts of rural South Africa…The issues around the lack of supply of water, the supply of contaminated water, and the potential sabotage in the supply of water.

The IRR is an advocacy organisation that fights for your right to make decisions about your life, family, and business, free from unnecessary government, political, and bureaucratic interference. It was established in 1929 and has remained true to its founding principles for these almost 90 years.

In his opinion, John Kane-Berman, a policy fellow at the IRR, states how millions of people in villages all over the country, water shortages are part of daily life. This opinion has become a living fact of many around the North West Province, specifically. Kane-Berman highlights how this lack of a human right has even come to a point where lives were destroyed and some lost. “Notoriously at Bloemhof in 2014 in North West province, possibly as many as 15 babies died when they drank filthy water. Elsewhere in the same year in the same province, in a township near Brits, four people died during protests against interruptions to their water supply.” Said Kane-Berman.

“Some of the people in Brits said the interruptions were deliberate, contrived by municipal officials wanting to generate business for friends who had turned themselves into water vendors. This, it appears, is a continuing problem. In April this year the minister of co-operative governance and traditional affairs, Zwelini Mkhize, voiced the suspicion that people in business with political links were sabotaging pipes in Vryburg so that they would then be called in by the municipality to bring in tankers to supply water. “An ANC source” in Mpumalanga said infrastructure was deliberately neglected or tampered with so that there was a need for mobile distribution of water.” According to Kane-Berman.

While the confidence proportion in the statistics regarding the services of the provision of water and sanitation by the government has dropped from just over 76% to a low 63% , from 2005 to 2016 respectively, the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) insists that assess to these services had improved “significantly”, but “reliability” was “currently declining”.

This also despite 2.68 million households identified “lack of safe and reliable water supply” at the top of the list containing the top 5 challenges facing municipalities in a survey on which DWS reported.

-IRR

-The VIP Team