In Tshwane, Water Is Fit to Flush, Not Fit to Drink

By Themba Khumalo

On 24 September, the Bronkhorstspruit Water Treatment Works stopped chlorinating the water it sent into people’s homes.

It remained that way until 14 October, according to the Department of Water and Sanitation.

For twenty-one days, a municipality charged with supplying safe, clean water to its residents delivered an unprotected, contaminated product through pipes and called it water.

The explanation is a masterpiece of bureaucratic shrugging. There were “issues with a chlorine supplier”. Chlorine is not a rare earth mineral or a vintage claret. It is among the most boringly available chemicals in the municipal arsenal, and the entire point of a water treatment works is that it does not run out of the one safeguard it cannot afford to be without.

A supplier problem is a procurement failure, and a procurement failure that goes unmanaged for three weeks is negligence.

Worse, the City did not warn residents. The law requires it to tell people when their water is unsafe, and it said nothing while children fell ill. The City, to its grudging credit, has since admitted it failed to warn residents.

Then there is the sewage. Upstream wastewater works were pouring pollution into the very source the plant draws from. So we had a treatment works with no disinfectant, drawing from a river fouled by another municipality’s wastewater works and by the City’s own broken sewage pump stations.

It is incompetence in a closed loop, and the residents sit at the end of it holding a glass.

Between 7 and 18 October, at least 408 people fell ill with acute gastrointestinal disease. Most of them were children under the age of four.

Picture a mother in Zithobeni at three in the morning, holding a child who is cramping and cannot understand why. The people most punished for the City’s carelessness are the ones who cannot yet speak, cannot boil a kettle and cannot be expected to know that the tap is a threat.

The National Institute for Communicable Diseases went looking and found Norovirus, Campylobacter and Shigella, together with extremely high levels of E. coli and total coliforms. That is a faecal cocktail, served daily, in kitchens across Bronkhorstspruit, Zithobeni, Rethabiseng, Dark City and Sokhulumi, all in Tshwane’s Region 7.

And the official advice? Do not drink it. Do not cook with it. Do not wash with it. Use it to flush your toilet. Consider the grim poetry of that instruction: the water the City supplies is now fit only to carry away the waste that the City’s negligence helped to spread.

Residents are paying rates and tariffs for a service whose sole remaining use is flushing a toilet.

The City has deployed 36 water tankers. Thirty-six, for communities of this size, with the practical advice to check notices for the routes. Anyone who has queued for a tanker with a bucket and a sick child on their hip knows what that means. It is a lottery of timing, transport and strength, administered to people who have already been failed once.

Those who develop severe diarrhoea, cramps or vomiting are told to go to a local clinic or Bronkhorstspruit Hospital. In other words, the municipality has made a mess and has outsourced the clean-up to the health system and the families.

None of this is new. Tshwane has form. Hammanskraal gave the country a cholera outbreak in 2023, with people dead and a nation looking on in horror, and every official involved promised the problem would be fixed. It was not.

The lesson has been taught repeatedly, and the municipality keeps failing the exam, because the lesson was never really about chlorine. It is about accountability, and accountability in Tshwane remains as scarce as safe water.

So here is what must happen, and it should happen without another press conference.

First, a full, public, independent investigation into the chlorine failure, with names attached—not a “process” that dissolves into a committee.

Second, immediate emergency supply contracts for disinfectant at every works in the municipality, with a second supplier on standby as a matter of law.

Third, daily published water-quality results, so that residents do not have to learn about contamination from the paediatric ward.

Fourth, the prosecution of anyone whose decisions or indifference allowed this, because negligence that sickens hundreds of small children is not an administrative hiccup. Fifth, compensation for the families, paid promptly, not litigated over for a decade.

Tshwane has been warned, shamed and forgiven in turn. It has treated every warning, every shaming and every pardon as an invitation to carry on.

Drag the officials responsible to the tap, hand them a glass, and ask them to drink. They will refuse, because they know exactly what is in that water, and hundreds of children were made to drink it.