My Take: ‘Load shedding’ an SA obsession

WHAT is this obsession with poo in South Africa?

It defies logic when someone wanting to prove a political point paints Parliament, airports and even Cecil John Rhodes’ bust with the stinking mess.

One would dearly like to be a fly on the wall of the train or taxi (and there’s bound to be plenty of the critters) while the protagonists are travelling to the dump sites, trying not to spill on their shiny shoes.

Pennington’s Dolphin Drive residents in particular must surely sympathise with those poor souls who are tasked with cleaning up after the dastardly deeds are done as they have had to put up with a similar stink since before 2010.

Knowing Ugu District Municipal Manager DD Naidoo personally, there is little doubt that he would have solved the problem personally… and ‘yesterday’… if he was able to so.

Alas, he inherited a bankrupt entity when he left Umdoni Municipality on a high several years ago. One can only imagine the mess he has been trying to clean up ever since, the Pennington pump station being the least of them.

In fact, he did try to think of an “out-the-box” solution at one of the meetings with the very patient office-bearers of the Pennington Ratepayers and Residents Association.

“Don’t laugh,” said former chairman Jan van Hilton. “Mr Naidoo promised to use a ‘robotic crawler’ which would spout out smoke wherever stormwater drainage was illegally connected to the sewerage system.”

The idea being that this is not quite kosher. The excess storm water overloads the already totally inadequate Dolphin Drive pump station and their waste flows into gardens, rivers, streams and the sea, staining a proudly Blue Flag beach.

Granted, the blame for this stinking situation has to be place squarely on local government’s shoulders, but in the interests of doing one’s bit to protect the environment (and Mrs Vosloo’s garden), the right thing to do is for residents to investigate how their stormwater is dissipated… at the very least.