Kumelo Koitheng has spent years fighting for clean, potable water in Hammanskraal, a battle that took him to parliament in September 2019.
For Koitheng, the deadly cholera outbreak in the peri-urban region north of Pretoria has highlighted the water crisis that has plagued Hammanskraal for nearly 20 years.
Since 15 May, 23 people have died of the acute intestinal infection, typically spread through contaminated water, in Hammanskraal, where South Africa’s outbreak is largely concentrated.
“The mood is so sad,” said Koitheng, the chairperson of the Hammanskraal Residents Forum. “Everybody is afraid because you never know who is going to be next.”
On Saturday, he buried his aunt, Clara Malope, 67, who died of cholera last week at the Jubilee District Hospital. “It happened so suddenly. She was complaining of a sore and runny stomach and was vomiting and was rushed to hospital. They couldn’t save her, she was old and sick; she wasn’t strong enough.”
Theuns Vogel, a farmer whose property in nearby Vasfontein neighbours the dysfunctional Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant, told of how he spends his days ferrying water on his bakkie so that he can have enough to try to run his farm.
Since 2011, the city has supplied farmers in the Apies River daily with clean drinking water after their water supply was contaminated by sewage pumped into the water supply — rivers, dams and underground water — from Rooiwal.
In March, Vogel and Koitheng obtained a court order forcing the city to supply water tankers to the agricultural community in the Apies River area and parts of Hammanskraal after it interrupted water supply for two weeks. It was then resumed three days a week.
Vogel said that it’s only now, after the cholera outbreak, that the water tankers arrive five days a week. But the allocated 25 litres per person daily is not enough for stock and crop production.
In April, Vogel wrote a letter to Tshwane’s new mayor, Cilliers Brink, describing how his was one of 80 agricultural properties and a town similarly affected by Rooiwal’s failures. He is yet to receive a response.
“The wastewater treatment work is not functional, and it is polluting water resources and the environment, the Apies River, groundwater and the surrounding landscape,” he wrote.
Partially but “mostly untreated” wastewater is discharged into the Apies River at the outlet of Rooiwal. “Wet sludge is discharged into unlined earth berm dams created for this purpose on previous agricultural land. This action has left the groundwater resources of the area polluted and unusable.”
He wrote that farming is no longer viable. “Crops, used for human consumption, cannot be grown here and the Tshwane Market does not accept crops irrigated with wastewater. Crops that are grown, like soya and yellow corn, do not grow well due to the impact of the untreated sewage water on the soils and plants. Animals die when they drink the sewage-polluted water or are left infertile.”
Because of the method of disposal of the sludge, the borehole water is unusable and irrigation dams are full of sludge.
Other economic activities in the area are also dying, such as wedding venues and guesthouses next to sludge and sewage-filled dams.
Vogel is “at the end of my road” in his fight for a healthy, viable future. “I have written letters, won court cases, appeals and interdicts but none has moved the City of Tshwane into action. This has occurred over 10 years at excessive cost.”
He told the Mail & Guardian how he had lost one crop after another because of the poor quality water while his property value had been cut by half, because he could not provide a water borehole certificate. “No one will buy a farm with a borehole not working because it’s poisoned.”
The Apies River flows into the Crocodile West Marico River, which becomes the border with Botswana, “so South Africa is polluting our neighbouring country’s water as well, an international crime”, he said.
Koitheng said that about 70% to 80% of Hammanskraal residents still use pit toilets. “At a particular house, you’ll find that they’ve dug seven to 10 holes and closed them up over the years. It’s possible that the water table has been contaminated because of the pit toilets.”
In an opinion piece this week, water specialist Anthony Turton, of the University of the Free State, said South Africa produces more than five billion litres of sewage daily, of which only about 10% is treated to a standard that makes it safe for direct human contact. The rest is discharged into rivers and dams.
“Our tsunami of sewage can no longer be diluted in our rivers,” Turton said, adding that more than 60% of South Africa’s large dams are now eutrophic, which depletes oxygen, and the flow of nutrients from sewage breeds toxic cyanobacteria (also called blue-green algae).
“In simple truth, we have lost our dilution capacity, and our rivers have been turned into hazardous sewers breeding harmful pathogens, including the flesh-eating bacteria that cost RW Johnson his leg [after cutting his foot on a rock while swimming in a lagoon at the Mpenjati Nature Reserve near Margate]. This means that cholera is only one of the risks we are facing from raw sewage in our rivers.”
South Africa and its water crises
For example, hepatitis A is a waterborne pathogen directly related to sewage-contaminated rivers, “but this is being reported separately in our slow-onset disaster, so the penny has yet to drop”, said Turton.
The department’s Green and Blue Drop reports showed that more than 90% of the country’s wastewater treatment works are dysfunctional.
An investigation is underway into the source or sources of the cholera outbreak in Hammanskraal. The source of the cholera infection has not been located, said Wisane Mavasa, spokesperson for the department of water and sanitation.
“It is important to note that cholera is not only spread through polluted water — it is also spread through poor hygiene, eating contaminated food or by coming into contact with the faeces of an infected person,” she said. “However, it is highly likely that the cholera outbreak, which started in Hammanskraal … is related to the pollution of water sources in the area from the City [of Tshwane’s] Rooiwal wastewater [sewage] treatment works upstream of Hammanskraal.”
Rooiwal is polluting the Apies River, which flows into the Leeukraal Dam, from which water is abstracted by the city’s Temba water treatment plant. In 2011, the department declared the Apies River and surrounds a disaster area because of pollution from Rooiwal. Mavasa said the water in the Leeukraal Dam is so polluted that the Temba plant cannot treat the water to meet the standards for drinking water.
She said tests on the water from the Temba plant indicate that it does not contain cholera bacteria and can be used for purposes other than drinking and cooking. “For this reason, the city is using water tankers to supply the residents of Hammanskraal within the supply area of the Temba water treatment works with drinking water.”
The department and the city have formed a joint task team to oversee the interventions to solve the problem of “depreciating water quality” of the Temba purification plant and an action plan to rehabilitate and upgrade Rooiwal “to the required production of drinking water quality standards”, said Mavasa.
Water governance expert Carin Bosman said in 2019 that the South African Human Rights Commission issued a warning to residents of Hammanskraal to not drink their water because it contained microbial contaminants, which can cause acute diarrhoeal diseases, and high nitrates, which can cause chronic health conditions, including some stomach cancers, and methemoglobinemia or “blue baby syndrome”.
The situation is “a direct result” of the lack of proper treatment of sewage by the City of Tshwane at its Rooiwal sewage works, “some 10km upstream from the Temba water purification works, and the Daspoort sewage treatment works, some 30km upstream from Temba,” Bosman said.
The infant mortality rate for South Africa in 2022 is 24.30 deaths per 1 000 live births. The world average is 20.35. The direct link between the effects of poor water quality and the lack of water services on infant mortality rates has been researched extensively, she said.
Unsafe drinking water can affect infant health in two ways. “First, during the gestation period, water contamination can harm the health status of the mother, and then hurt the foetus. Second, infants have vulnerable immune systems and are more susceptible to infectious diseases such as gastroenteritis and pneumonia, especially when the mother has to use contaminated water to prepare milk formula, when she cannot produce milk due to malnutrition.” In South Africa, diarrhoeal diseases are the second-biggest contributing factor to infant mortality, after HIV and neonatal causes, Bosman said.
