By Asemahle Vumsindo
When Rhodes University’s recent graduate Terri Harris set out to study Makhanda’s water management system, she wasn’t just conducting academic research; she was probing a question many in the small Eastern Cape town ask daily: why isn’t the water coming?
Acknowledging the immense frustration felt by the community. she was motivated to understand the systemic reasons why access to a basic human right was failing.
Harris’ master’s thesis, “A constant state of failure: characterisation of the water management system of a small South African town”, offers a revealing look into the complex reasons behind Makhanda’s fragile water system. Harris, who studies Human Kinetics and Ergonomics (HKE), applied this discipline to understand the crisis.
Harris explained her approach: “Studying ergonomics means we look at people and their interactions with the environment and we look at how to improve their well-being.” She said she applied this systemic knowledge to find the reasons for the water issues, adding that “the municipality was also willing to work with me in my research”. This approach involved mapping how people and processes interact. Harris concluded that the system is currently experiencing a dangerous “drift toward failure”.
Decades of decisions lead to collapse
Harris’s research pins down decades of systemic issues that have caused the gradual decline in water supply, primarily driven by financial mismanagement and severe resource deficits. The analysis reveals that the lack of a dedicated infrastructure maintenance budget is central to the crisis. Harris found that when the municipality stopped allocating 10% of the budget to infrastructure maintenance in the late 1990s, the funds never returned.
As infrastructure began to age, it started to break down without the budget to fix it. “Now Makhanda sits in a situation where they have an overwhelming amount of system breakages and no financial resources to fix them,” she noted.
The impact is immediately felt in communities like Joza. Harris said to properly serve high-need areas, “Upgrades are needed to get a higher capacity of water flowing to communities since areas like Joza are suffering from constant water outages.”
Resource deficits in the trenches
The consequences of this financial collapse are felt most acutely by the municipal workers attempting to fix the system. Harris’s findings detail critical weaknesses in operations:
- Lack of equipment: the municipality owns no TLBs (large scale machines that dig trenches), forcing staff to wait until a machine can be rented, costing time and money. Alternatively, workers must manually dig through tar and rock to reach burst pipes, severely delaying repairs.
- Transport failure: a critical lack of vehicles means plumbing teams are often unable to reach system breakdowns in town or at the distant James Kleynhans Water Treatment Facility quickly.
- Vacancies and overload: multiple system vacancies lead to employees being “severely over-worked, over-stretched, and over-stressed”.
Resilience and acts of ingenuity
Despite the overwhelming system failures, the research also highlights the extraordinary resilience of ground-level staff, who often keep the brittle system operational against all odds. She found that despite system mismanagement and shortages of resources, there are people in the system that try their best with the little they have to keep the system operational.
Operators show resourcefulness by making their own tools, such as nets to clean settling tanks out of old poles and netting. Employees demonstrate ingenuity by creating their own office furniture out of old car seats and metal cages. Workers often purchase their own stationery for paper-based reports, or dig trenches with their bare hands when tools are missing.
Harris noted, however, that often the failures of a brittle system outweigh the best intentions of resilient staff. This human resilience extends to working vast amounts of unpaid overtime due to transport issues, and answering breakdown calls at all hours from 7am to 4am to keep the water flowing for the community, including for their own families.
From blame culture to belonging
Another dangerous fracture in the water management system is a severe lack of vertical integration which shows itself in a lack of communication and trust between leadership and ground workers. The research captured the deep psychological fracture among workers, who felt management did not know them or hear their concerns. This lack of communication creates a culture of fear, where employees are scared of repercussions for making or reporting mistakes, which can lead to larger problems being hidden.
To address this systemic conflict, Harris provides actionable recommendations that the municipality can action immediately:
- Improve vertical integration: hold frequent meetings for all employees to discuss operations and concerns. Leadership must promote reliable reporting without resorting to a blame culture.
- Enforce accountability: enforce consequences for non-performing municipal officials and those who mismanage finances to set a necessary precedent.
- Leverage strengths: formally recognise and reward the “resourcefulness, innovation, and collaboration” of existing employees. This recognition is key to boosting morale and restoring trust.
- Financial restructuring: immediately seek money to re-create a dedicated infrastructure maintenance budget.
Harris concludes that her findings echo far beyond Makhanda’s borders, reminding residents and officials alike that in every broken system, the human spirit continues to strive to make it work.
