The commission has spoken — now do something for Makhanda’s people

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The SA Human Rights Commission’s damning findings on the Makana municipality should shock every South African — but sadly, they no longer surprise us.

For years, residents of Makhanda and surrounding areas have lived without the most basic services many citizens take for granted — a regular supply of clean water and functioning sanitation.

Just last week, The Herald reported how frustrated residents had taken to the streets, effectively shutting down the City of Saints as they blocked roads with burning tyres and trees in protest against the ongoing service delivery failures.

In April, Grahamstown Deserves Better chair Devon Waldick described the situation in the town as “total chaos”.

“It’s just lawlessness; we stay in a municipality that doesn’t care for our people,” he said.

“One feels oppressed in this town.

“You have to buy water to wash your clothes and to wash yourself because the water that comes out of the tap is so dirty that you can’t even wash your mouth with it.”

Presenting its findings on Wednesday, the commission declared the water and sanitation crisis a violation of people’s fundamental constitutional rights.

Commissioner Dr Henk Boshoff said the town’s residents were living lives of indignity.

“Are we not witnessing the characteristics of a municipality that doesn’t care about its community and residents?”

The commission found that the crisis in Makhanda was not primarily caused by a lack of available water resources, but the result of governance failures, the deterioration of infrastructure, weak accountability and institutional instability.

The commission recommended that the Eastern Cape government consider dissolving the Makana municipality council under Section 139(1)(c) of the constitution — a last-resort intervention reserved for severely dysfunctional municipalities.

It also called for a review on whether Makana should continue to manage its own water services, suggesting that these responsibilities might need to be handed over to a more capable authority.

We welcome the recommendations and hope the report will spur the relevant authorities to take action to drastically improve basic services in Makhanda.

Failure to do so would be to continue to impede the rights of its residents to access sufficient water, as enshrined in the constitution.