The only way a service provider can demand payment is to suspend his services. But that route has left the poorest of the poor in ith maggot-infested toilets and the only option of relieving themselves in the bushes.
Two months before the local government elections, Tlokwe Municipality erected 25 chemical toilets for the 1 600 shacks in Marikana. This was in response to a memorandum from the Marikana informal settlement community on 15 April 2015.
But one of the community’s activists, Thembisile Tekani, says the municipality has not paid the service provider to clean the toilets for the past five months. (Interestingly, this was when the elections were held.) ‘The municipality has failed to pay the R22 000 a month to the service provider,’ he said. The service provider faithfully continued to clean the toilets for four months but, when no payment was forthcoming, they suspended their services and the facilities have not been attended to or cleaned for a month.
Service delivery, therefore, continues to be a pipe dream for the people of Marikana. Thembisile feels that their human rights are being violated and that the municipality does not care about them. ‘It saddens me that children, women and men have to dig holes in the bushes and cover them up when they are done.
‘…our women are already exposed to serious dangers without mentioning the total degradation of their dignity that they have to face every day,’ said Thembisile in the memorandum of 2015. Twenty-four months down the line and they are back to square one.
‘This is a health risk to all of us,’ he said this week. To him and his community, it seems that no one at the municipality is batting an eyelid about their humiliating living conditions.
Willie Maphosa, the council spokesperson, says the service provider was appointed to clean the toilets at Marikana and was supposed to have started on 6 February. He said the company later told them they had backlogs to deal with and could not start immediately. This breach of agreement was unacceptable to the municipality and affected their appointment.
He added that an alternative company was subsequently appointed and started working on the afternoon of 6 February to assist with the clean-up.
‘When we last spoke to a representative of the company, they were struggling to manoeuvre the truck in between the dense settlement. However, the situation is receiving attention,’ said Maphosa.
Thembisile refutes the response from the council and categorically denies that the service provider breached the agreement with the municipality. ‘The service provider stopped cleaning the toilets because they hadn’t been paid for months. The interim company appointed by the municipality does not have the resources to clean the toilets. They had been struggling since Monday and have since left.
‘After pressure from the community, the municipality deposited the money into the service provider’s account on Tuesday afternoon.
‘The service provider will start cleaning the toilets again on Thursday morning,’ he said.