A court order will be served on the Vhembe District Municipality (VDM) to compel them to supply water, says AfriForum.

At the time of going to press, chairman of AfriForum Louis Trichardt Mr Wally Schultz was on his way to Polokwane to meet the Pretoria legal team for the final signing off on the papers, so that the court order could be served this week.

Schultz, together with Messrs Lampie Schoeman and Herman Smith, met with the AfriForum legal team last Wednesday. They spent about two hours with the attorneys, Mr Willie Spies, Mr Werner Human and Ms Marika van der Walt, a specialist in water law.

“We presented them with ample information, affidavits and photographs of water and sewerage ‘hot spots’ in town and explained the history of our battle for service. We all went from there to Advocate Jan Saunders, who established the way forward,” Schultz said.

Although this first important legal step has been taken, it unfortunately does not mean that the town will have water immediately.

“This is only the first step in a series of probably many steps to ensure a long-term solution for our water supply. After the interdict, we will not stop. We will force the municipality to be accountable for each individual task, such as the repairing of each pump, the building of the reservoir that’s not visibly progressing, or the telemetric water flow meter that is not operational. We will not let up until people have water,” Schultz said. He added that the AfriForum legal team had the willpower, the sense of urgency and the resources to push it through.

Schultz said that the municipality would have to start taking responsibility and caring for their equipment. At the water crisis meeting of 18 July, Mr Radidzai Madimutsa, VDM’s acting general manager for technical services, blamed vandalism as the main cause for the current problems.

“Madimutsa is correct: the pump stations are indeed vandalised and theft of cables and other equipment does occur … but what Mr Madimutsa does not tell us, is that he and his staff are directly responsible for allowing this. Not one pump station is under lock and key. Shockingly, some of these stations do not even have gates. It is an open invitation for vandals and thieves, and the municipality must shoulder 100% of the blame for this sloppy security management and the cost of constantly replacing cables, which they literally ‘allow to be stolen’,” Schultz said.

Even more shocking is that the telemetric water flow meter that was installed some years ago at the cost of millions of rands is not working. “If the telemetric water flow pumps work properly, they will automatically direct water from where there is water to where there is none. This costly equipment had been installed and had never worked for one day, because no one knows how to operate it. It is not even locked,” Schultz said.