Quinton Mtyala
THE Western Cape has lost ground in providing toilet facilities to households, and there are more “bucket” toilets in the province than in Gauteng, according to the latest General Household Survey from Statistics SA.
While there’s generally been an increase in the number of households nationally with access to “RDP-standard” sanitation, with the Western Cape leading with 93.3%, but also trailing Gauteng when it comes to the prevalence of bucket toilets.
In the Western Cape 5.5% of households still have bucket toilets, compared to only 1.6% in Gauteng.
In the City of Cape Town this translated to 67 000 households.
The survey found that the majority of households in Johannesburg (96.9%) and Nelson Mandela Bay (94.6%) had access to “RDP standard” toilet facilities, while households in Tshwane (82.0%) and eThekwini (83.5%) were the least likely to have RDP standard toilet facilities.
And despite the improved access to RDP-standard sanitation facilities, many households remained without any proper sanitation facilities, although this had been on the decline since 2002.
Nationally, the percentage of households that continued to live without proper sanitation facilities had been declining consistently between 2002 and 2015, decreasing from 12.3% to 4.7% during this period.
Most of these youngsters find themselves in informal settlements, at the bottom-end of the priority list for low-cost housing.
The Social Justice Coalition (SJC) said the Western Cape government, and municipalities had to improve sanitation for these informal areas considering migration into the province.
The SJC’s head of local government programme, Axolile Notywala, said informal settlements were still being treated as temporary and were not being prioritised by local governments, particularly in the Western Cape.
“That’s why there’s a lack of investment in terms of infrastructure in all informal settlements. Government seems to think that informal settlements will just go away, but with urbanisation there are going to be more informal settlements in the next 20 to 30 years.”
With an increasing number of informal settlements, he said local municipalities would have to better plan service provision in these areas.
But Western Cape local government and planning MEC Anton Bredell’s spokesperson James-Brent Styan queried the figures, quoting another set of statistics from StatsSA, which showed that the provision of “sanitation was the best in the Western Cape”.
The City of Cape Town had earlier disputed the results of the General Household Survey, instead choosing the non-financial status of municipalities’ survey also from StatSA to boast that the DA-controlled metro was providing adequate sanitation to informal settlements.
Deputy mayor Ian Neilson said some households continued to use bucket toilets, which were then emptied into the communal system because of safety concerns.
The survey found that about one-quarter (24.7%) of households were concerned by poor lighting and inadequate hygiene (22.2%), while 18.2% felt that their physical safety was threatened when using the toilet.
And about one-fifth (18.5%) complained that there was no water to wash their hands after they had used the toilet, and another 16.7% pointed to long waiting times.