MAKHUDU SEFARA | ‘Directionless and unguided’ has never been more true

Believe it or not, I arrived in Seshego, Polokwane, early on Saturday and left just before sunset on Sunday and there was no running water the whole time. And when I ask what the hell is going on, they just shrug it off as normal.

We make noise about the looming Day Zero in Nelson Mandela Bay. Yet Seshego already has some type of Day Zero, it seems, not because the water has run out. This is because the city has either run out of professionals to ensure the supply of good and clean water, or politicians with the will to ensure things get done. Or someone has a tender to go around in a truck pretending to deliver water to the distraught community.

It’s unbelievable; it’s worse than load-shedding.

Words from former president Thabo Mbeki, describing the depths of depravity at the height of state capture, kept playing out in my mind last weekend. Mbeki said he was “deeply troubled by a feeling of great unease that our beloved motherland is losing its sense of direction” and what he needed to do to “respond to what is obviously a dangerous and unacceptable situation of directionlessness and unguided national drift”.

Zuma is now gone and I kept wondering if the deeply troubling situation of directionlessness and unguided national drift were also gone, given the great unease caused not just by the various stages of load-shedding but the soul-crushing waterless situation in Seshego.

On the Sunday morning, I went for a quick run and, on my return, had to confront what had become an urgent need for a bath. Accepting the shower had become obsolete in the absence of the elusive droplets, I tried to fit my deformed frame into a large bath bowl (don’t ask me how this went, I am close to tears).

Relying on a small kitchen kettle, it took a while to get the water warm enough to bathe. It was the most uncomfortable thing. I looked like a volunteer actor in those low-budget Nigerian movies with poor sound. I then remembered that the last time I did what I tried in this bath bowl this Sunday, was as a primary school kid at the height of apartheid.

Now, 28 years into our democracy, just when I thought the vagaries of apartheid have been banished from my humble existence, the ANC government in Limpopo took me back to that indignity of a bath in a bowl.

Now, 28 years into our democracy, just when I thought the vagaries of apartheid have been banished from my humble existence, the ANC government in Limpopo took me back to that indignity of a bath in a bowl in a house where there’s a shower.

Later in the day, as I drove off to Joburg (for a proper shower), I was, like Mbeki, deeply troubled that the people I left behind must continue to endure a life of hits and misses about water. They have internalised the inconvenience and incompetence. They have a mayor named John Mpe, who won convincingly last November, yet their pipes are dry and the issue is not even trending on social media. President Cyril Ramaphosa often says South Africans are resilient. Eusebius McKaiser, our TimesLIVE Premium analyst, has pointed out we should not have to develop resilience because we are subjected to incompetence.

As I arrived in Joburg, I was not so much worried about stage six or four of these rolling power outages. At least we get to use electricity intermittently in a day. I started making sense of my suffering. The horror from Seshego helped me lower my bar, to develop the Ramaphosa resilience. If people spend the weekend without water, why am I hard on Eskom, which simply takes power for a few hours? My smile was mirthless because deep inside, like Mbeki, I was deeply troubled by the directionlessness and unguided drift slowly eviscerating a population. I think Mpe is left to his own devices to figure out what it means to be a mayor in Polokwane. The people of Seshego must just be strong. Just before the next elections, he will find the water.

Some say water in Seshego is made available in the middle of the night but is unavailable during the day. As a result, some wake up at midnight to fill up their buckets and/or water tanks. What kind of life is that? Setting a water alarm for 1am? It must be a warped version of a better life for all. We must also wonder whether the people of Tenderpark, Bendor and other suburbs experience this waterlessness – or if it is simply the non-complaining township folk who must grin and bear the incompetence of Mpe?

Spare a thought for what happens in the homes of people without water tanks. This water scarcity has also spawned a new market for JoJo water tanks in the township, with the more well-off buying water pumps to mitigate the disaster.

All I needed in Seshego was just an hour of water supply during the day. That’s it. How hard can that be? Even Eskom gives us more than an hour per day, right? Excuse my warped resilience! But without the one hour, Mpe makes life in Seshego an unbearable extreme sport. If you add to this the fact that many others around the country still fetch water in rivers and ravines, you can’t help but cry for our beloved country.

But this surely can’t be right, right?

As I drove with my wife, she reminded me of Ga-Rankuwa’s own nightmares: a police station that closes at night because there are no lights; a local water reservoir that is leaking, damaging people’s houses; and Dr George Mukhari Academic Hospital that is, for all intents and purposes, falling apart with desperate locals battling to simply get a bed.

But forget Seshego and Garankuwa. If you drive between Letlhabile, Brits and Fafung, past Jericho, in North West, the potholes make the people of Joburg look like spoilt brats. There’s no potholes in Joburg — try driving to Fafung! If you like your car a little bit, your heart might just stop. On some parts of the road, which I used about a month ago, motorists get off what is supposed to be a tarred road to avoid the dongas. At this point, the gravel road is preferred. The neglect is simply breathtaking.

Yet we have leaders in every sphere of government. The people of Polokwane have mayor Mpe and a minister responsible for water, Senzo Mchunu, who are either clueless on what to do or are so ensconced in their offices they don’t give a rat’s behind what happens to “our people” – a phrase they will be using a lot in the lead-up to the next elections.

And Madibeng mayor Douglas Maimane is supposed to ensure the road between Brits and Fafung is in fact a road, but alas.

And back in Joburg, we have had to buy inverters and anti-power-surges to protect appliances because life and the economy must not stop in spite of our government’s best efforts. Seshego, Garankuwa, Jericho and Fafung represent the many unnamed places where South Africans are subjected to the deeply troubling situation of directionlessness and unguided national drift, unleashing much pain about which they have developed a resilience that must make us feel the sort of unease Mbeki felt about Zuma. And I have not even mentioned Phala Phala farmgate!