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The situation has been out of control that [Nkomazi Local Municipality] residents received drinking water from the municipality on 06 May 2023 wherein live fish came through the pipes into people’s houses.

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Sizwe sama Yende

The Mbombela High Court in Mpumalanga has ordered the municipal manager of Nkomazi Local Municipality, Xolani Mabila, to prevent sewerage spillage into the Crocodile in 21 days or face a 90-days prison sentence.  

The town of Komatipoort, situated on the border to Mozambique, has been experiencing water shortages for a while but the municipality has not been deploying water tankers, according to the Komatipoort Despondent Residents Association which brought the application.

Residents had been forced to ask for water from individuals who owned boreholes.

They claim that the municipality had neglected them for a long time. “The situation has been out of control that residents received drinking water from the municipality on 06 May 2023 wherein live fish came through the pipes into people’s houses,” reads the court papers.

“The water could not be used as it contained many impurities.”

The Crocodile Rivers flows into Mozambique and is one of the main sources of water in Nkomazi.

Judge Lindiwe Vukeya has ordered Mabila and the Nkomazi municipality to fix the spillage within 21 days and that it:

·      Fulfils its constitutional obligation by providing portable water to the residents every day;

·      Files a report within 21 days on how it has resolved the spillage and what measures it has taken to prevent it from recurring.

The association was authorised to appoint an expert to monitor the sewage works for a period of 12 weeks at the municipality’s cost.

Nkomazi Local Municipality spokesperson, Cyril Ripinga, has released a statement claiming that the municipality has deployed people to work on the problem.

Nkomazi is not the only municipality that has received an adverse judgment from the courts on contamination of the environment and water. Many municipalities in the country are facing this challenge as their wastewater sewage networks collapse due to many reasons such as growing populations and being old.

In 2022, the Lydenburg Magistrate’s Court fined the Thaba Chweu Local Municipality R10 million for allowing sewage to spill into a river and leaving refuse uncollected.

The court found that  municipal manager, Siphiwe Matsi, repeatedly ignored complaints about the sewage spilling into the Dorps River, and the waste thad been piling up on streets since 2011.

Matsi pleaded guilty to all the charges, which included:

. Unauthorised disposal of waste in contravention of the National Environmental Management Waste Act in that the municipality did not provide waste containers for residents to put their garbage in and did not collect waste timeously;

. Failure to comply with the conditions stipulated in the water use licence in contravention of the National Water Act. The municipality operated its wastewater management plants so poorly that this led to the disposal and discharge of raw and untreated effluent in a manner detrimental to water resources and the health of residents.