For over a week, Primrose has been left high and dry, its residents thirsty and increasingly frustrated, writes Sheree Bega.
Johannesburg - Tania Esterhuizen tugs at her mother’s sleeve. “Mom, I’m thirsty,” pleads the eight-year-old, staring longingly at the idling water tanker. “I need water.”
Under each arm, the child holds an empty water bottle, which she can no longer wait to be filled. “Just a minute my baby, you will get water now, I promise,” says her mother, Tracey, gently hushing her.
But Esterhuizen is worried they may not get water today. There is no petrol for the generator that pumps out the tanker’s water, so its driver is trying to manoeuvre his vehicle to a slope so gravity can push the precious cargo out.
“This is a catastrophe,” says Esterhuizen. “It’s no joke. You can do without electricity. But… you can’t live without water.”
Esterhuizen and her two children live across the road from Solly’s supermarket in Primrose, east of Joburg, which has turned into a disaster rendezvous of sorts.
Things are becoming more desperate at home. “I’m thinking of putting my children in nappies – my son is five – and using wipes again,” she says. “The toilets are a nightmare. How can you tell your child he can’t go to the toilet because there is no water to flush it?”
Every night, she packs her family into the car, and cuts across Joburg, finding salvation with relatives in the south where some taps, thankfully, are still running. “It’s using so much petrol, but what can I do?” she shrugs. “I cannot bear to let my children go to bed with dirty feet and dirty nails.”
Here, in Primrose, it’s ground zero for Gauteng’s water crisis. For over a week, the suburb has been left high and dry, its residents thirsty and increasingly frustrated.
There are only four pupils at the local high school. Nursery schools have shut. Even in nearby Malvern, there is no water, not a bottle, on the shelves of the local garage. By anecdotal accounts, plastic shops are doing a roaring trade.
Here, at Solly’s, neighbours have become friends, trading stories about where to buy the cheapest containers and when last water gurgled out of their taps. “It’s takeaways for us every night – you should see the dishes in my house,” one woman tells her compatriots in the water queue. “I’m diabetic and I have to drink water all day long.” They shake their heads in sympathy.
“I saw someone from Primrose Hill, who put his big plastic swimming pool on the back of his bakkie,” Esterhuizen tells the group. “He made the guy at the tanker fill it. He probably has a lot of water now,” says Esterhuizen enviously, as she watches other residents turn rice containers and lunchboxes into water holders.
She continues: “A friend gave me a 30-litre drum, which was great. But thank God, I smelt it first. It had been used for paint thinners. I would have been high while drinking my coffee,” she laughs.
Then, almost as if she is revealing a secret, she tells them. “I had water this morning. I filled my bath, I filled the sinks. But now, it’s gone again. There is nothing.”
Esterhuizen’s neighbours, Charlotte Gorman and her partner Brandon, stand parched and pale in the harsh sun, their seven-month-old baby, Matthew, cooing in his pram. A red bucket hangs limply from the pram, inside a small water bottle knocks around. Surely, this won’t last long? “We have some water at home,” explains Brandon. “We come here a couple of times a day. We just need to top up.”
“Luckily we have a lot of bottles,” says Gorman. “But there is no water to clean them. We haven’t been able to wash the baby’s clothes either. Keeping the baby – and ourselves – clean has been a struggle.” They are going to the UK in a month. They think it will be a lucky escape from these new uncertainties.
Loading his new water containers into his bakkie, Aldo Liebenberg looks like he has had enough of this. “We hear it will come back in 14 days. Fourteen days,” he exclaims. “Or they say it will be back tomorrow. But it doesn’t come back.
“… there is more to this than the municipality and Rand Water are telling us. They tell us the cables have been stolen, the transformer has blown, but suddenly you have water at 8pm… then it’s gone again.”
Down the road, water sloshes from two large buckets Ben Ngwena struggles to juggle in his arms. Self-employed, he has had to miss two appointments today so he can look after his 3-year-old son – and fetch water. The crèche has shut.
“I’m completely unprepared for this,” he says, wiping sweat from his brow. “See these containers don’t even have lids. We bathe our kids in these small dishes. If you’re used to a shower, forget it. At this point, that’s a luxury.
“I’ve been going to friends and relatives to ask for water, it’s not ideal. We don’t know how safe this water is – what those water tanks were used for before. But because we are desperate, we’ll take risks.”
Like Liebenberg, Ngwenya is not buying the “litany of lies” uttered by authorities this week: that Gauteng’s water crisis was caused by the perfect storm – protracted power outages, and warm weather have caused reservoirs to dry up – and panic buying has exacerbated the problem.
And because of Primrose’s geography – it is high lying – that makes it more difficult to pump water into the reservoirs.
“Nobody has explained why these reservoirs have run dry, and why no one foresaw this. Someone has messed up big time. This is our government and no one is taking responsibility.”
Then, there’s the niggling worry of how long this will last. “It’s becoming like a daily chore now, going to get water.” Then, almost rhetorically. “How long will this last?”
But it’s been even worse in Makausi, a huddle of shacks on the beaten edge of Primrose. The water tankers may have come to Primrose and nearby Bedfordview, but they forgot its impoverished community, claim residents. “It’s like we don’t matter,” says Robert Mabaso.
There was no water at all – until Wednesday when, pushed to the limit, they devised their own plan, opening a valve near a water main in a patch of veld in Primrose.
“This was just a pipe, somebody saw it’s the same pipe that takes the water to the community,” says Maxwell Ndlovu. “We just opened the valve. The whole community is coming here.”
Now, this stretch of veld has become an oasis. Residents scoop water into buckets, sandwich containers and baby bottles and wash their soiled clothes. Children splash in the pools of water, spraying each other.
There is so much water it looks like it will never end. “We don’t know where this water comes from, we don’t know if it’s safe,” says Ndlovu. “It could have Ebola,” he says, conspiratorially. “Or it could have cholera. Then we’ll all get it because the whole community is coming here now.”
It’s better now that there is water. “In our community there are just a few taps, and even where there is water, they don’t work properly,” says Albertina Letsoalo, an unemployed boilermaker, knee deep in the pools of water, scooping it out into her 25-litre drum.
“We’re used to struggling with little water. But these past 10 days have been the worst. It’s been terrible. If we wanted water, we would have to wake up at midnight or 2am, and go to the taps outside, because that’s when it comes – then it stops again.”
Her friend, Atrisha Mokgatli, carrying her nine-month-old baby, adds: “Without water, one day you’re fine, two days even is okay, but not nearly two weeks. You cannot live without water. Water is life.”
But their little oasis has turned deadly. A woman was stabbed here on Friday night. Her blood stains the grass where she died. “It’s unsafe to walk here, and you can see it’s just five minutes from our shacks. But we can’t come here alone to get water,” worries Ndlovu.
Even once the water returns, his friend Mabaso holds out little hope for his poverty-stricken community – that there will ever be enough water.
“If you come back next week, you’ll find me here, doing the same thing, getting this water here. I know this government. It won’t fix the problem, not for us anyway.”
Saturday Star