Makana councillors have expressed their dissatisfaction with the municipality’s inability to promptly inform the public about the causes and effects of last week’s water crisis.
Makana councillors have expressed their dissatisfaction with the municipality’s inability to promptly inform the public about the causes and effects of last week’s water crisis.
“The issue of water is becoming a bigger headache and something that does not seem to want to go away,” Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana told a special council meeting in a packed Council Chamber on Thursday. He said he regretted the fact that “residents were not informed of what is happening and when they will get water".
However, he assured that “we are working around the clock to attend to this problem”. Democratic Alliance (DA) councillor Les Reynolds slammed the municipality for taking so long to communicate the causes of the water outage. “Four days down the line we get communication,” he said. “We need to have a protocol in place to address residents and we need to be proactive in these areas.”
“We have an official whose duty is to communicate notices to the public timeously, the lack of communication is just unacceptable,” Reynolds explained. “We can’t have the same pipes breaking all the time in the same areas.” He suggested that all the municipality’s employees who are suspected of neglecting their duties be charged, including technical and infrastructural services director Dabula Njilo.
ANC councillor Mxolisi Ntshiba said the municipality’s official statement on the outages fell short of assuring residents that the interruptions will end. “The municipality is an accredited water supplier but we don’t act like we are,” he said.
Municipal Manager Ntombi Baart explained that the crisis was caused by a burst pipe in African Street last Monday evening, prompting negative remarks from residents. The group of residents were making themselves heard but council speaker Rachel Madinda warned them to keep quiet as they were not allowed to talk during council meetings.
“Some municipal officials closed water valves and forgot to open them,” said Baart. She said this caused a great deal of water to be lost, resulting in an intermediate reservoir which draws water from Waainek running low.
“Contingency measures were put in place to draw water from other reservoirs to fill up the Waainek reservoir,” she elaborated. She assured councillors and residents present at the meeting that water will be back by 7pm that night.
The councillors criticised the employees responsible for the crisis and insisted that disciplinary steps should be taken against them and that Baart investigates the matter and later shares the details with the council.
Lwana urged councillors to communicate with their wards to solve the problem. “This one problem is not insurmountable and we are going to deal with it,” he added confidently.
Responding to Whisson’s question about Njilo’s conspicuous absence from the meeting, Madinda said that he was at the water reservoirs trying to fix the problem. Whisson reported that during the water crisis a resident made 15 calls to the municipality over three days to enquire about the water cuts and that five different officials in the engineering department gave different explanations for the problem.
