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Some Vryburg residents claim they were not surprised that in the weeks leading up to the small North West town playing host to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Women’s Day jamboree last Friday, water was flowing from their taps “day and night”.
Garbage trucks roared across the townships – at least where Ramaphosa was expected to pass – cleaning up the trash dumps once a common feature on the streets of Vryburg when City Press visited recently.
The army of waste collectors from the Naledi Local Municipality offloaded most of the stinky cargo of several months at a dumping site along the N18, which connects Vryburg to nearby Taung, they said.
Driving into town on the Mahikeng side, the obnoxious smell that locals had complained about for months had seemingly dissipated.
Or maybe the stench was just heavily masked by the winter morning smoke bellowing from deep inside a settlement of shacks that nestle around town.
A group of contractors had also arrived in town to assist with getting the sewage plant fully functional, one resident said.
Not far from the plant is a stream covered with green algae that has blossomed from “feeding on the biodegradable components of raw sewage” as well as the water and abundant sunlight.
A short drive across town was relatively decent, except for some huge potholes here and there on the evidently aging road infrastructure.
The town was also too calm given Ramaphosa’s arrival, lacking the usual fanfare associated with national celebrations. Finding the event posters on the streets was an equally strenuous exercise.
A high presence of security personnel on every intersection was probably the best sign that the “Buffalo” – as Ramaphosa is fondly called – was descending on the town once dubbed the Texas of South Africa due to the area’s suitability for cattle farming and beef production.
On Thursday night, a day before Ramaphosa’s big address and celebration, a local radio station cast a spotlight on the state of Vryburg and invited residents to call in or contribute to the discussion via social media.
“Our Vryburg people are sickly because the town is filthy and smelly. White people have closed the industries after democracy and the new government did not even try to revive that,” said one of the guests, Andrew Babeile, infamous for being at the centre of racial tensions in the area some two decades ago when he stabbed a fellow white pupil with a pair of scissors during a brawl.
Aobakwe Monthisi said the heydays were gone and the town remained the Texas of South Africa only on paper.
Although racial tensions had gone down over the years, said Monthisi, “the cattle feedlots have diminished because people who hold the economy, mainly whites, have left the area or they are no longer contributing to its development”.
His proposal is that Vryburg should be at the centre of the renewed drive by government to build new agro-processing industries in order to boost economic growth and create employment.
Other callers complained about water scarcity, unemployment, information blackout on job opportunities, the filth, the smell, lack of services and financial maladministration in government”.
In the 2017/18 local government audit results, the North West, together with the Free State and Limpopo, did not have a single municipality with a clean audit, including Vryburg’s Naledi Local Municipality and the nearby Dr Ruth Segomotso Mompati District Municipality.
Hlomani Chauke, coordinator of the ANC interim provincial committee in the North West, said service delivery and clean governance would only be realised when accountability was enforced, particularly from the side of the governing party.
“When those engaging on those issues like councillors make sure that proper systems are put in place, we will be able to make an impact and change the lives of our people,” Chauke said.
You need a very strong ANC to encourage service delivery, he said, “which would make sure that those deployed in government are accountable to the organisation, and those who are deployed in government are giving services to our people”.
He said the challenge was to “fight issues of corruption and mismanagement of public money”.
“It is again the responsibility of the ANC to hold our councillors accountable, to hold the council that is led by the ANC accountable on how they are spending public money,” he said.
Chauke is among a cohort of new leaders who were last week introduced as the interim committee of the ANC in the province, which was disbanded and interim leaders repeatedly replaced since September last year.
Also last year, central government placed the North West provincial government under administration, citing a collapse of governance.
The majority of municipalities in the province are under administration or cash-strapped.
Chauke said the ANC was of the view that the water scarcity problem in Vryburg was deliberate “because it is individuals enriching themselves”.
“This region has a lot of water, but water is not reaching the people,” he said.
He said municipal officials deliberately created the water crisis so they could use private tankers to provide the service and “enrich themselves”.
“And we ask ourselves, why would council want to use tankers against infrastructure that is newly established such as purification pumps and so forth? This thing is not meant for anything but to benefit individuals.”
At Kasi Kota car wash in Huhudi, the business has erected a water tank in the yard, which they use for their operations.
Ahead of the elections earlier this year when City Press visited Huhudi, water was flowing uninterrupted from the car wash but 55-year-old Abel Moepeng’s house across the road did not have a single drop.
The streets were barricaded with rocks and burning shrubs as community members took to the streets to demand water.
Last week Moepeng was not home but his neighbours were willing to speak out, among them 39-year-old Nomzi Yawa, who was relieved that for the first time in months the taps had not run dry, “thanks to Ramaphosa”.
Her 31-year-old niece, Rethabile, chipped in: “The water has been gone for a month but this week, day and night, we had water.”
But Yawa said her biggest gripe was the high unemployment rate in Vryburg and lack of opportunities for locals to even start small enterprises.
She reminisced about the time when she was growing up, when her mother Grace Baratang, now 72 years old, used to sell fat cakes for R2 each outside a nearby clothing factory called Piccoli Material and Babyland.
“There was life then, even if white people were calling us k*****s. The ANC liberated us but the people in power have brought us down,” she said.
“We voted but we are still staying at home. We voted for the same man who is standing and speaking that other side,” Yawa said, pointing in the direction of the Vryburg showgrounds, where Ramaphosa had just delivered his Women’s Day speech.
Exacerbating things for her family’s wellbeing, she said, was the fact that her husband, a municipal employee at Naledi, had not been paid for four months because the funds had been exhausted.
The Piccoli factory, along the N14 connecting Vryburg to Schweizer-Reneke, is in walking distance from the sewage plant, only separated by the green-algae stream.
Those in the know said the factory was once one of the biggest employers in Vryburg, specialising in manufacturing uniforms for nurses, the police and soldiers.
The factory also made curtains and bedsheets, according to fading signage outside the yard which has a prominent “for sale” sign on it.
The local Vryburg airport has not been spared by the town’s decline, either.
Visible from the N18, the airport site has become a playground for children, who have found something amusing to do with the old tyres scattered around.
Others are using some of the space as a football ground.
At best, the locals use it as a short cut to walk from housing settlements on the side of N18 to those along the N14.
The vandalised hangars are the only reminder that there was once an airport in Vryburg – which some claim was the biggest in the North West.
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