The mayor has warned the Makana council that the current water shortage constitutes an unprecedented
crisis in the history of Makana Municipality.
The mayor has warned the Makana council that the current water shortage constitutes an unprecedented
crisis in the history of Makana Municipality.
“We have reached a crisis which we have never experienced before,” said Makana Mayor Vumile Lwana during his opening statements to the special council meeting on Wednesday.
He says the two days of light rain Grahamstown experienced this week didn’t do much to alleviate the pressure.
Lwana said that he has observed that the use of boreholes as a main water sources is touted as being the only solution but that it is not.
He added that schools should be informed about alternative sources of water. “It would be useful for people to water their gardens in the morning or in the evening only,” he said.
He also said that he is aware that since the municipality recently started supplying Grahamstown West with water from Glen Melville Dam, some residents have started questioning the level of quality of the dam water.
He argued that while Grahamstown East residents had complained about the “hard taste” of the water before, the latest complaints by their counterparts are raising alarm bells.
He said that the latest complaints were uncalled for because the people in Grahamstown East have been drinking the water for ages and that they have not complained about its quality.
Before he asserted that the complaints create an impression of “a tale of twocities” where it is acceptable for one section of the community to live on water from a source which the other section denounces.
Since water restrictions were imposed last year the municipality has been publishing fortnightly reports on the water levels in the dams.
The latest report indicated that the largest dam, Settlers, is down to 6% of capacity at just three metres deep. Howison’s Poort is 34% full and Milner Dam is only a quarter full.
On another matter, Lwana noted that it has been two-and-a-half years since the campaign to rename the town had died and said that it was time for the council to lay down a proper process to take the campaign forward.
Lwana’s predecessor Pumelelo Kate announced in 2007 that the name Grahamstown was offensive and that “it had to go”.
This was received with mixed feelings by the residents as some agreed with Kate while others argued that the name was not offensive.
The most notable group which opposed the process was the Keep Grahamstown Grahamstown (KGG) campaign which was started by Advocate Jock McConnachie as a positive campaign to contribute to the name change process.
The KGG reported that a survey it conducted at strategic points in town showed that the majority of the local residents were opposed to a name change.
This finding was reiterated by research which was subsequently undertaken by the Rhodes University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research. The research report showed that the majority of residents in Grahamstown East did not support the name change.
