The small community of Vuu in the Vuwani area has been at loggerheads with the Makhado Municipality about ownership of the land on which the community is currently living.

This is adversely hampering service delivery to the community of about 5 000 residents. The municipality says that the land rightfully belongs to the municipality after it was proclaimed and further maintains that the Vuu community is living on the land illegally.

On the other hand, the chief of the Vuu community, Vho-Nelson Ramathithi, said that they hadn't invaded the land. “We only came back to the place of our ancestors,” said Ramathithi. “This place is literally marked with lots of evidence from the time of our ancestors who first lived here on this mountain.”

He added that the matter of the land was in the hands of the courts, and that his feeling was that the municipality should provide water to residents while the court was still deciding on the case. “My people – who are all legal citizens of this country – need water,” he said.

He is worried that the office of the municipality is rejecting the Vuu community and calling them illegal occupants. “The Makhado Municipality and their allies claim that this land has been proclaimed and so on,” he said.

“Whom did they consult with during the proclamation process? And who facilitated the process? Did they visit this place and check for the evidence which shows that this is the place of our ancestors?”

The spokesperson for the Makhado Municipality, Mr Louis Bobodi, responded to our media inquiry. “Those people invaded the land; in other words, they are living on that land illegally,” Bobodi said. “They should engage us only on the issue of water and we will see how best we can provide them with water. They have a right to clean water, whether they are living on that land legally or illegally. We can only give them water - only water."

The community's representative, Mr Thabelo Nalana, said that they would visit the municipality once again and engage them not only on the issue of the unavailability of water. “We also need electricity in this dark and bushy village,” said Nalana. "We need services in this village; after all, we are the voters who vote for the leadership of this country."