Parliament hears of elders forced to defecate in plastic packets, as water crisis persists ahead of polls

Parliament’s water and sanitation portfolio committee heard troubling accounts on Tuesday of communities in the North West going without basic sanitation.

This came as MPs pressed the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) on whether billions of rand spent on intervention projects were actually reaching ordinary households.

MK Party MP Visvin Reddy told the committee that elderly residents in the province were defecating in plastic packets and asking their grandchildren to throw the packets into the bushes because there was no sanitation.

He said the account came from an elderly woman during recent public hearings.

“We heard a case where an elderly woman told us that elderly people are defecating in plastic packets and asking their grandchildren to throw these packets into the bushes. [This is] happening because there’s no sanitation,” Reddy said.

“That is somebody’s grandmother. That’s somebody’s mother, minister.”

Deputy minister responds, defends department’s record

Minister David Mahlobo said the department shared the same experiences MPs described from their oversight visits.

“We do have the same experiences like you do. We do go to the ground,” he said, before crediting the current administration for elevating water as a national priority.

“For the first time there is a high level of leadership on water that has never happened before,” he said, pointing to direct presidential involvement in the sector.

Mahlobo pushed back on suggestions that the department had failed to support struggling municipalities, citing recent budget commitments.

“Chair, you look at the budget we have passed just this year alone. 400 projects are meant to support municipalities to deliver water and sanitation services,” he said.

He argued that Section 63 interventions were bound by legal limits, stressing that such action “can never and should never be arbitrary in a constitutional democracy.”

Other MPs echo concerns about unresolved failures

Other committee members backed Reddy’s account.

DA MP Stephen Moore said the visits to affected communities were “directly linked to the presentation in that they’re failed infrastructure projects,” warning that “infrastructure can be completed without the underlying service delivery failure being permanently resolved.”

Moore cited cases where boreholes had been built but never worked, telling the committee that “almost every village we hear about tells us they get no support, but then they tell us actually no, there’s a borehole here. It just doesn’t work.”

A separate committee member raised similar frustrations from oversight visits to Mpumalanga, questioning what happened to the boreholes after they were drilled and who was responsible for keeping them functional once they were handed over to municipalities.

Deputy minister links accountability to upcoming elections

Deputy minister, Jack Bloom, agreed that leadership failures in local government were central to the crisis, and pointed to the approaching municipal vote as a potential turning point.

“Yes, I absolutely agree that there are leadership issues involved and hopefully that will be clarified after November,” he said, adding that municipalities needed to be “fully staffed with appropriately qualified people” to sustain any infrastructure gains.

Mahlobo welcomed the tone of the discussion.

“What I appreciate is that the country has a conversation now,” he said, while cautioning that resolving the underlying dysfunction in municipalities remained a “whole of government” responsibility beyond his department’s control.

Other issues raised during the briefing

Beyond the exchange over sanitation in the North West, the committee also received updates on a package treatment plant at Hammanskraal now supplying 50 megalitres of water a day, ongoing bulk water connections in Giyani, and difficulties linking new water schemes in KwaZulu-Natal to the electricity grid.

Officials also flagged vandalism and cable theft at treatment works, and cases where boreholes had been drilled but left unequipped with pumps due to funding shortfalls.

Committee vows to keep tracking progress

Reddy urged colleagues not to reduce the crisis to figures.

“We sit and talk politics here, but people are battling with no water. Water cannot be a statistic. Water, we say, is life.

“We talk about sanitation being dignity. How can we allow that grandmother, or any human being, to be forced to live worse than animals in this country? We can’t allow this to happen,” he said.

The committee chairperson, Leonard Basson, thanked the department for the briefing and confirmed that members would submit written questions to track individual projects ahead of further reporting, with the November elections looming over the department’s next steps.