By Anna Majavu
Makhanda’s residents and opposition political parties are inundating community social media pages and WhatsApp groups with complaints about a rising number of water and sewage leaks in the town, with some leaks said to be years old.
Ward Four councillor Geoff Embling of the DA, estimates that 40% of the town’s daily supply of 18 megalitres (million litres) of pumped and treated water is lost to leaks – as much as 7.2 million litres every day.
Makana Citizens Front (MCF) secretary Ayanda Kota says the municipality must immediately train unemployed community members as plumbing technicians, and form a team of these technicians that will fix all the leaks fast. “The MCF demands that the council prioritise this issue and train plumbers. Later, it should absorb all those plumbers into the workforce”, said Kota.
“This is wasted water, clean water that could be saved only if we had a functional municipality. Everything in Makana Municipality is leaking – the budget for service delivery has leaks and the leadership is full of leaks,” Kota said.
One Makhanda resident said on 8 August that a leak in Frances Street had been “running for a few years. Many litres of water gone to waste”. Another resident supplied a photo of a leak in Clarke Street they said they’d been reporting fruitlessly to the municipality for five years, who had allegedly never repaired it.
Embling warned that there were several sewage leaks flowing directly into the Kowie Ditch/Gowie Dam system. “The municipality fixed a leak by the railway line (near Withypool Rd), and the Albany Sports Club members sponsored a private plumber to unblock two sewage leaks in the bush between Albany fields and Graeme College,” Embling said.
A major sewage leak near the army base has been running for more than two months, and Embling says it is yet to receive any attention from the municipality. “The sewage leaks in the Scotts Farm area are atrocious, and the municipality has slowed down noticeably over the past few months regarding infrastructure issues. The latest council agenda stated that during the last quarter, the municipality met zero out of nine key performance areas (KPI’s) relating to infrastructure maintenance” said Embling.
Meanwhile, residents continue to circulate photos and videos of water and sewage leaks, which they say they’ve reported to the municipality. In Worcester St, West Hill, residents said they had been without water since 1 August, yet just metres away from their homes, a giant water leak was running unabated.
Makana Municipality did not respond to questions from Grocott’s Mail asking if they were keeping a record of the number of water leaks and sewage leaks. Grocott’s Mail also asked if the municipality kept a record of the number of litres of water per day that was lost to leaks, and if the Municipality was planning to introduce a plumbing team to fix all the current water leaks quickly, and received no response.
However, Amathole Water contacted councillors on 8 August to say that one of their managers had “visited most leaks” this week, accompanied by a Makana plumber and that Amathole Water would repair the major leaks in town within three days. Makana Municipality had agreed to make municipal plumbers available for the job, using Amathole Water fittings and pipes.
When Nelson Mandela Bay faced the threat of ‘Day Zero’ or total water cut-off in 2022, it was able to save millions of litres of water just by fixing about 3000 water leaks.
