Health hazards plague Emfuleni townships:
The rubbish tips and contaminated waterways in the townships of Emfuleni local municipality in southern Gauteng — caused by broken wastewater infrastructure and refuse removal services — are visible to the naked eye.
The invisible effect of it on residents’ health is a more serious, potentially devastating long-term problem.
In Boipatong, Phuthulla Primary School has struggled for at least eight years with the flow of sewage from broken pipes into the school yard when it rains, creating lakes around the classroom buildings and turning the outdoor play areas into a health hazard.
A senior office-bearer at the school, who did not want to be named, says the schoolchildren often suffer from skin rashes and stomach problems.
“Late last year we had to send all of them home,” he said, adding that as a result many parents have removed their children from the school.
Complaints about alarming levels of air pollution caused by industry (mostly steel production) and coal mining, as well as commercial, and agricultural land use, have echoed for years throughout Emfuleni.
The high incidence of asthma in the townships of Evaton, Sebokeng, Sharpeville, Boipatong, Bophelong and Tshepiso — all within the municipality — is well documented, with waterborne diseases an added burden caused by the frequent contamination of the municipality’s water sources.
In Jabulile Sindane’s 2022 thesis, titled The Impacts of Water Quality on the Residential Areas of Emfuleni Local Municipality: A Case Study of Rietspruit River Catchment, most of the 260 respondents in the study complained of “skin rashes and diarrhoea developed by children who make contact with the untreated sewage when playing on the streets”.
Sindane went on to publish a peer-reviewed journal article on the subject in 2023, which confirmed the severity of socio-economic strain that these infrastructural issues have had on residents and businesses alike.
Sewage-contaminated water contains E. coli and salmonella bacteria, the common causes of diarrhoea and stomach cramps, symptoms that can be particularly hazardous for children and older people who may experience dehydration and other complications.
Respondents also complained that air pollution “worsened some of their health conditions such as asthma”, an issue raised during a visit by Good Governance Africa, a research and advocacy nonprofit, to Phuthulla Primary School.
“Some of the children are suffering from breathing problems,” said the senior school official.
The air quality in this area is so poor it occasionally hits headlines. On 12 July 2023, Bloomberg’s DataDash cited Vereeniging as having the worst air quality in the world. The publication used data from OpenAQ that measured 46.13 micrograms per cubic metres (g/m3) of fine particulate matter measuring 2.5mm in diameter or less.
Fine particulates can get deep into the lungs and even the bloodstream. Extensive global research has found that over the long term, exposure to air pollution can lead to heart disease, lung cancer and respiratory illnesses such as asthma and emphysema.
When it comes to exposure to water pollution — through drinking, bathing or water-based cooking — the harmful substances, which include heavy metals, chemicals and bacteria, can lead to cancer, neurological disorders, reproductive problems and developmental abnormalities.
The imperative to tackle air and water pollution in Emfuleni, therefore, cannot be overstated.
Last July, the Gauteng high court ordered several government ministers and the Gauteng premier to stop the sewage pollution of the Vaal River and its tributaries, finding that “the discharge of raw or inadequately treated sewage from Emfuleni’s municipal wastewater care and management system into the Rietspruit River/Klip River/Vaal River and the Vaal River Catchment Areas” was in contravention of the National Environmental Management Act and the National Water Act.
Yet little has been done. In Good Governance Africa’s 2024 Governance Performance Index, Emfuleni scored last of the six municipalities in Gauteng. For secondary cities across the country, it ranked 17th of a total of 19.
On 26 February this year, nine ward councillors in the area wrote a letter to the Gauteng premier, Panyaza Lesufi, pointing out that household refuse removal had “finally broken down completely with some suburbs reportedly having been last serviced more than eight weeks ago”.
“The reason given by the municipality to councillors and residents alike … is the unavailability of working contractors needed to facilitate the refuse collections. This in spite of the fact that Gauteng Province gave the municipality nine new compactors [machines used to reduce the size of waste material] as recently as the 2021/2022 financial year,” the letter stated.
Only a week ago, on 1 April, the municipality warned residents that water in some parts of the Vaal area, including Sebokeng Zone 7, Palm Springs, Beverley Hills, Lakeside and Evaton, had been contaminated as a result of a collapsed sewer pipeline.
Water tankers were deployed while technicians fixed the problem.
“You’d know that some of our infrastructure is very old and sometimes the conditions become poor and it breaks and gets dilapidated,” said Emfuleni municipality’s chief director, Madoda Besani.
“So what happens is that because of this you’d find sewage that’s leaking in various parts and ponds around the water network, and if it’s broken, the sewage finds its way inside the network.”
This piecemeal crisis management approach continues to define Emfuleni local municipality’s response to the situation, in no small part because of the instability caused by an unwieldy coalition government that has resulted in conflicts and problems in decision-making, service delivery and budget allocation.
The council also faces overwhelming debt — at close to R9??billion owed to Eskom and Rand Water for services, according to the council’s 2022-23 audit report.
“The legacy debt to Eskom and Rand Water currently makes the Emfuleni municipality unworkable on its own,” says Democratic Alliance MP Dennis Ryder.
“The only way to redress this disaster is good governance, appropriately funded, with a seven- to 10-year consistent executive focused on fixing it with all three spheres of government on board.”
Given its clear governance deficit, Good Governance Africa hopes to make Emfuleni municipality a core focus of its work in South Africa for the next few years and contribute to its stabilisation.
The immediate and long-term health and environmental impacts of pollution aside, consistently ignoring urgent societal needs leads to democratic backsliding, warns Good Governance Africa’s senior data analyst Pranish Desai.
“If problems such as those visible at Phuthulla Primary School are not effectively addressed with sufficient haste, then apathy and disillusionment can consolidate into something far more menacing: the destabilisation of our hard-won democracy and in its place, a ripe environment for unrest,” he says.
Requests for comment from the Gauteng department of education on conditions at Phuthulla Primary School were unsuccessful by the time of going to print.
Helen Grange is the editor of Good Governance Africa’s monthly Africa in Fact Insights magazine. In this election year, the GGA is running a voter awareness campaign in its AiF Quarterly, the monthly AIF Insights, and on its website and in the Mail & Guardian. An entire edition of AIF in the third quarter will focus on disinformation and how to combat it, given the bumper crop of elections on the continent.
Behind the political spin of Zuma’s MK party:
With some polling showing that Jacob Zuma’s uMkhonto weSizwe party could rival the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) in KwaZulu-Natal, and potentially lead a coalition government in KwaZulu-Natal, it is important to make clear sense of the MK party.
The dominant view in the liberal media presents Zuma’s politics as nothing but corruption, as criminality, and often desires its eradication from the political terrain in favour of a liberal consensus. Liberalism, in turn, desires the sort of authority that can put an end to politics as a set of questions about power and justice in favour of the elite-driven technocratic anti-politics that ended in populist revolts in the US and parts of Europe.
Zuma’s party has attracted a good number of opportunists, the kind of people that, in the words of Frantz Fanon, aspire to “keep in the running and to be part of the racket”. But this is not all that it is, and even the crassest forms of political opportunism must develop some sort of ideological appeal to win popular support.
Zuma has personally taken extreme right-wing positions on gender, sexuality and migration. This should not be dismissed. In the absence of emancipatory alternatives, scapegoating and sadism can win appeal in times when people cannot find paths into viable forms of life.
Zuma’s party also has a strong ethnic dimension. Although seldom present in formal speech, it is often present in the language used as the party mobilises support on the ground. It is common for ethnic forms of politics to fester when national liberation projects fail. They allow elites to claim to speak for their people without having a material programme in support of their interests and can become seriously socially and politically toxic.
There is also an anti-colonial element to Zuma’s project in the form of claims to affirm African culture and reject white and Western domination. The affirmation of culture and the rejection of Western domination are both expressed via affiliation with authoritarianism.
But the most significant of the hinges that connects the MK party to political players outside the party, including the Economic Freedom Fighters and parts of the ANC, is the set of ideas and practices initially referred to as “radical economic transformation” (RET).
There is a class dimension to this. One participant in the rebellion in the ANC that brought Zuma to power gleefully described it as “the rebellion of the uneducated”. He meant that people locked out of circuits of accumulation in and around the ANC because of their class position had stormed their way in.
There was also a racial dimension as elites in the RET project challenged the hold of white capital on parts of the economy, such as the provision of goods and services to the state-owned enterprises. Later, as armed groups started extorting money from construction companies, the challenge to white capital widened.
The moves to break the hold of the laws, policies and practices developed to sustain a liberal democracy have enabled rapid accumulation for many politically connected people, from winning tenders to build houses that are never actually built to local party thugs selling land and extorting rent from shack dwellers at gunpoint.
This has generated an excitement with elements of both the pyramid scheme and the prosperity cult. As with claims to restore the standing of African culture, the attack on these laws is also sometimes presented in the language of decoloniality.
Although politically connected people were enriched during Zuma’s presidency, most people’s circumstances worsened, and there was a sharp decline in many of our institutions and infrastructure. In the same way that pyramid schemes and prosperity cults can make some people very rich very quickly but can never make everyone rich, accumulation through predation off the state cannot enable collective advancement.
The idea that Zuma’s presidency enjoyed deliriously excited support in general, or among impoverished people in particular, was sheer spin on the part of Zuma’s allies and another of the many myths endlessly repeated in liberal circles. The ANC lost electoral support during his presidency and the residents of his own electoral ward preferred the IFP. Organised impoverished people in Durban were the first to describe Zuma’s ANC in terms of political gangsterism long before the elite public sphere began to grasp this aspect of Zuma’s rule.
The claim that Zuma is man of the left is farcical. He held the presidency of the country for a little less than nine years without developing a programme for land reform, making any progress towards addressing the housing crisis, doing away with neoliberal macro-economic policy, nationalising the platinum mines, fixing the schooling and health systems, or addressing systemic violence, mass unemployment and impoverishment.
He was president during the Marikana massacre and did not speak up against the assassination of grassroots activists, in some cases definitively encouraged or carried out by his allies. In KZN the RET project was accompanied by severe intimidation and violence by local party thugs and politics often took on a gangsterised and violent character akin to that of Central America.
It is true, though, that when the pressure to remove Zuma from office reached a crescendo he sought to legitimise himself by declaring support for free education. Some people have understood this as emanating from a previously masked or constrained left nationalist commitment.
There is no evidence for this but there is some similarity with the way in which, after he had lost the support of the majority of Zimbabweans, Robert Mugabe sought to restore his standing and secure his hold on power by supporting independently organised land occupations.
If Zuma won access to provincial power via a collation arrangement he may try to repeat this kind of gesture to secure his position. It is possible that there could be some immediate collective gains but this kind of move would be made with the aim of cementing his power, a predatory and repressive form of power with no interest in building the sorts of social institutions and policy mechanisms that can enable sustained collective progress.
Many of the protagonists in the project that coalesced around Zuma in the ANC, and many of their actions, were resonant of the predatory and repressive national bourgeoise against which Fanon railed. But the imbrication of class, race and a sense that current laws and rules function to sustain exclusion over the ruthless pursuit of accumulation by a political mafia should not be dismissed as mere spin.
Zuma and the wider RET project do speak to some real issues and aspirations, which liberalism prefers to ignore and oppose. This must be acknowledged without collapsing into the delusion that Zuma’s politics are on the side of the people.
Fanon warned against Manichean political thinking, the idea of a binary split between good and evil, between us and them, friend and enemy. History provides tragic confirmation of the urgency of his warning. François Duvalier came to power in Haiti in 1957 through, in part, the ideology of Noirisme that adopting an anti-racist and anti-colonial posture affirmed cultural inclusion and racial redress for the majority. He ran a staggeringly brutal and corrupt US-backed dictatorship that was disastrous for most Haitians.
Mobutu Sese Seko’s reign in Zaïre had a similar character. His dictatorship was legitimised in the name of Authenticité, which included strong anti-colonial elements in terms of access to jobs, promotion of culture, names, dress and more. It was as disastrous for ordinary people as Duvalier’s rule in Haiti.
For Fanon the transcendence of Manichean thinking requires progress on “the weary road to rational knowledge”, a road travelled through experience, thinking and learning within struggle. National consciousness cannot, on its own, ensure that national elites do not establish predatory and violent dictatorships in the name of anti-colonialism, dictatorships that may have some anti-colonial elements.
Fanon insisted that it is imperative to develop a politics that, grounded in a social consciousness, is both anti-colonial and opposed to predatory national elites.
Neither liberalism nor Zuma’s project can do this for us. Opposing the latter in the name of the former is not a viable means to resolve our social and political crisis. The status quo is not viable for most of us. But the corruption, authoritarianism, extreme social conservatism and predilection for violence that traverse Zuma’s project are a clear and present danger to society and to democracy.
Democracy can only be defended by its expansion, and by reanimating politics as a matter of power, popular democratic power, and justice, justice for the people as a whole.
Richard Pithouse is a research associate in the philosophy department at the University of Connecticut.
‘I will not resign,’ says Nzimande on NSFAS board dissolution:
Higher Education Minister Blade Nzimande said he will not resign and that his detractors are just ‘playing politics’ by calling for him to step down after he did not immediately intervene in the failure of the National Student Financial Aid Scheme (NSFAS).
Nzimande was speaking at a media briefing on Sunday during which he addressed his reasons for dissolving the NSFAS board on Friday and placing the institution under administration.
After the resignation of NSFAS chair Ernest Khosa and the dissolution of the NSFAS board, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and ActionSA called for the immediate resignation of Nzimande.
But, those were not the only organisations calling for the minister’s head. The Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa) also called for Nzimande to step down saying that, if the minister fails to do so, President Cyril Ramaphosa should fire him immediately.
“Who is saying I must resign? I will not resign, I am not appointed by them,” Nzimande said.
The minister presented a laundry list of failures by the NSFAS board which led to its dissolution. The list included everything from the board’s inability to submit a corrected annual report to parliament to the institution’s consistent inability to respond to student queries in a timeous and efficient manner.
“I have consistently raised my concerns with the outgoing NSFAS board about the inability and failure of NSFAS to carry out and implement some of its most basic responsibilities,” Nzimande said.
He faulted the board on its inability to fully implement the recommendations of a Werksmans report, including that NSFAS should terminate contracts with its direct payment service providers, which were allegedly appointed irregularly. “I raised this in December. I said steps must be taken to remove these service providers and that has not happened,” Nzimande said.
The allowance payment system’s collapse is at the centre of Outa’s calls for Nzimande’s resignation. The organisation revealed leaked recordings, exposing damning allegations of corruption involving Nzimande and Khosa. Nzimande has denied the allegations against him.
The minister also bemoaned NSFAS management’s consistent inability to ensure timeous student allowance payments, which he said has threatened the stability of some of the country’s universities and technical and vocational education and training colleges.
Nzimande said he had engaged the board on several occasions and presented various solutions, including a turnaround strategy which has not been achieved within agreed timelines.
Financial aid scheme’s woes have not only negatively affected the wellbeing of students, he said, but have also brought reputational damage to NSFAS, department and government. “Our detractors have been celebrating these weaknesses,” the minister added.
Sithembiso Freeman Nomvalo has been appointed as the new NSFAS administrator effective from 12 April.
According to Nzimande, NSFAS will continue to operate while it is under administration. “The dissolution of the board will not affect normal functioning of NSFAS including all payments that need to be made,” he said.
“We are not going to change our commitment. We are doing this because we want to improve the functionality of the organisation.”
Nomvalo will report to the minister. He will have to submit a written report every three months on the progress at NSFAS. “The decision to dissolve the board was not taken lightly. And, in taking this decision, I have considered all possible implications — including the impact it might have on NSFAS employees and students,” Nzimande said.
Submit and get free exposure here: Showcase Your Business | Advertise Your Special Offers.
