By the Makana Citizens’ Front (MCF) and Unemployed Peoples’ Movement (UPM)
We are the poor and the unemployed of Makhanda. No one will speak or stand for us. We speak and act for ourselves. We are a people with conscious and autonomous political agency. We are the Unemployed People’s Movement and the Makana Citizens’ Front.
We do not turn whichever way as the political winds blow. We are not toys that bow to the narrow party political shenanigans of either the ruling African National Congress (ANC) or the opposition Democratic Alliance DA). Both these parties advance neo-liberal policies that hollow out the state and promote the privatisation of basic services. In the lead-up to the 2024 national elections, we believe we will witness intensified political shenanigans between the ANC and the DA. This is nothing but meaningless, elite politicking. It will do nothing to solve the hunger, poverty, misery, and squalor defining the lives of the majority. We call on these two parties to put their hands to the wheel and join us in solving the problems of our people.
Continuing service delivery failures
We are extremely frustrated and angry at the continuing failures of the ANC to deliver basic services to the people of Makhanda. Our people still suffer the indignity of the bucket system. Even worse is the inability of this municipality to provide us with clean, safe drinking water. Despite the fact that the government has spent close to R400-million on upgrading dilapidated infrastructure at the James Kleynhans Water Treatment Works, this year alone there have been more than 100 water outages in Makhanda. Even the water that eventually trickles into our taps is below safe drinking standards.
This municipality and the Amatola Water Board have manifestly failed to upgrade the Water Treatment Works since 2013. Instead of a successful upgrade, we have seen a worsening water crisis and they have blamed everything except themselves. As we can now so clearly see, this upgrade has been a business opportunity where the state has become the ‘public’ arm of the ‘private’.
Upgrade of water works becomes an endless business opportunity for tenderpreneurs
In this role, the local municipality and the Amatola Water Board have turned the upgrade of the Water Treatment Works into endless business opportunities for tenderpreneurs rather than a public good. Even worse, the municipality’s interpretation of the court-instructed Financial Recovery Plan seeks to make the poor pay for the basic services which should be provided to all as a universal public good. This is worsened by the severe austerity budgets of the last few years, which have reduced the number of fiscal allocations to municipalities.
These management and policy failures are now likely to be worsened by the climate crisis. With the April 2022 floods in northern parts of the Eastern Cape province and in KwaZulu-Natal, we saw the importance of functional and accountable municipalities in responding to climate shocks. Proper local services should build people’s resilience, reconstruct and climate-proof settlements, fix broken roads, stormwater drains, water and sewage pipes, street lighting, and provide proper municipal services (including wastewater treatment works), water, use renewables such as solar water heaters, and be based on accountability and participation. Our municipality is far from this. We fear a catastrophe should we suffer a severe climate shock in the near future.
People’s Engineering Panel and Water Monitors
The foregoing is what has led us to decide to set up a People’s Engineering Panel to get to the bottom of the Makhanda water crisis. By the end of June, we will issue a call for the nomination of progressive engineers and other technical experts to constitute this panel. We call on the people of Makhanda to define the mandate and work of this panel. To kickstart this discussion, we believe that this panel must focus on the following:
- Produce a definitive baseline report on the water crisis in Makhanda – its impact, its causes, and identify the culprits responsible;
- Table a set of recommendations for solving the crisis as urgently as possible; and
- Train 10 water monitors per ward in basic technical water treatment skills.
Further, the water monitors will conduct weekly tests and monitoring visits at both the Waainek and the James Kleynhans Water Treatment Works and produce a People’s Monthly Water Monitor. This will ensure that we can go beyond the propaganda that the municipality has consistently fed us.
MCF and UPM to conduct social audit on all municipal monies spent on water
We will also monitor and undertake a social audit of all municipal expenditures on water. Through this, we will expose corruption, mismanagement, and maladministration. We will ensure that all municipal finance is optimally spent to solve the water crisis and other basic needs. We will also ensure that from the Mayor down, all municipal employees perform their work according to well-established standards and without any involvement in corruption, fraud, or other malfeasance.
We give the municipality no more than six months to solve the water crisis. We will also use mass action whenever the above initiatives are blocked by any quarter in the municipality, provincial government, or the Amatola Water Board.
No false solutions
We, therefore, reject and dismiss the self-serving call by the local DA for the removal of the Mayor as if that will magically conjure up new machinery that will address all the intractable failures of this municipality. The ANC has always recalled Mayors when they are under pressure. The problems facing this municipality are structural and systemic and go beyond one individual. They require stability and sustained focus on solving their problems. We, therefore, call on the Mayor to perform as required and to ensure transparency, democratic participation, and accountability. We also call on her to ensure that the municipality does not block any of the above actions that we will undertake. Failure on any of these fronts will not stop us from demanding accountability, even to the point of his replacement or once again, the dissolution of the municipality itself.
We call on the community of Makhanda to join us as we build the power to reclaim the municipality from below and make it work. We must reject sectarianism and gimmicks to gain votes that have characterised South Africa’s politics.
