While some Soutpansberg residents suffer without a continuous water supply, the opposite is the case on a farm just east of Louis Trichardt, where unwanted water has been leaking freely for the past five months.

“Just take this water away. I cannot get into the land to cut the forage,” said farm manager Ms Caroline Mukondeleli.

An exasperated Ms Mukondeleli told how she had attempted numerous times over the past months to get the municipality to repair a leak on the main water pipeline. The leak appeared on the farm Enig of Mr Ben Mouton some 25km out on the Thohoyandou road. The water has flooded a large area, turning it into a swamp.

The breaking point came when Mukondeleli got stuck with a tractor and grass cutter last Tuesday when she needed to get into a field planted with Chinese grass.

“I am supposed to cut the forage in order to make compost and then urgently apply the compost to the orchard. When the tractor got stuck in the mud, most of the work on the farm had to stop in order for the workers to pull me out with another tractor,” Mukondeleli said. It took hours to salvage the tractor from the mud.

Mukondeleli said that the municipality had sent someone out to survey the problem about two months ago. “They promised to come and repair it but never came ... They don’t care,” Mukondeleli said.

A member of the Soutpansberg Ratepayers Association (SRPA) visited the farm on June 29. “I was shocked to see the extent of the water leak. Two inspection holes were completely covered with water ... It terrifies me to think how many kilolitres of water had been wasted over the past five months,” the SRPA member said.

The chairperson of the SRPA, Mr Chrisjan van den Berg, expressed his concern regarding yet another major leak along the town´s main water supply line from the Albasini Dam. In April, another leak also occurred on the pipeline about 10km out of town. This leak was eventually repaired on April 15, after it was claimed that it had been leaking for at least four months. At the time, the Makhado Municipality´s spokesperson denied that the water had been leaking for four months and insisted that the pipeline was inspected regularly.

In no uncertain terms, Van den Berg ascribed the latest water leak to “the practice of no maintenance” and negligence on the side of local government. “Regular inspections of the pipeline and regular maintenance appear to be out of fashion. We are lodging an investigation to force the municipality to inspect and maintain the pipeline on a regular basis, like they did in Delmas,” Van den Berg says in a media statement. Van den Berg contacted the Makhado municipal manager on July 1, but by July 4, the leak had yet to be fixed.

The SRPA said that it posed a major problem that the Makhado Municipality and the Vhembe District Municipality passed the buck in cases like these. The Vhembe District Municipality was approached on Monday for comment.

Mr Matodzi Ralushai, Vhembe’s spokesperson, said he would speak to Vhembe’s Technical Director, who would, via the technical department of the Makhado Municipality, get people to fix the leak.

“We don’t want to lose water for there are other areas where there is a water challenge,” Ralushai said. Mr Moses Shivambe, Vhembe’s media liaison officer, also confirmed that a team would go out and assess the nature of the problem.

By the time of going to press it was confirmed that a team had arrived and was busy working on the problem.