The Witness: Sick settlers suffer as landowner cuts water

Sick settlers suffer as landowner cuts water
02 Oct 2008
Thando Mgaga

Residents of Sakha informal settlement in Mkondeni are up in arms with
Mayor Zanele Hlatshwayo and their ward 37 councillor, Sandy Lyne, over
the slow pace of service delivery to the poor community.

The informal settlement was in the media spotlight in July last year
when “larney land-grabbers” came in 4x4s and tried to stake a claim on
“free land”.

Sakha community leader Nathi Zaca said that since then, Hlatshwayo and
Lyne have ignored invitations to listen to complaints about their basic
service needs.

He said they heeded Hlatshwayo’s call to form a committee to communicate
with the municipality.

“Since October last year, we have been trying to get the mayor and ward
councillor to speak to us about our problems, and get a report on what
has been decided about being allocated land to build homes for ourselves
and children”.

Zaca said the community are also in dire need of water and electricity.

He claimed that residents were without water for two days this week
because the landowner of the property switched off the water.

“We are suffering. When we reported the water outages to the
municipality, the response we got was that they cannot do anything to
help us because the water was cut from a private property.

We have sick people here and should they all die because of one
landowner?” said Zaca.

Attempts to get a comment from the mayor were unsuccessful. Lyne said
she has met the community on several occasions, but the mayor has never
been present. She said she made it clear to the residents that they are
on private land and council cannot help them.

thandom@witness.co.za