LettersOpinion

OPINION: ‘Water outages violate human rights’

Ugu District Municipality needs to be placed under administration and a capable administrator must be employed.

DEAR Editor,-

Thousands of Ugu District Municipality residents have continued to suffer through severe water outages. In some communities, it is approaching its seventh day.

For many others, it’s a continuation of months of outages and it is the vulnerable, elderly, sick and children who are suffering the worst.

ALSO READ : WATER UPDATE: Repairs to pipeline successfully completed

The current crisis is a failure of all three spheres of ANC government. Ugu District Municipality has completely collapsed under the watch of Mayor Mondli Chiliza, both in its finances and in service delivery.

Maintenance should be planned and rolled out systemically throughout the year, yet this has not occurred.

Mayor Chiliza and his team continue to spend only 2.9 percent of the net asset value on maintenance instead of the recommended eight percent.

The Democratic Alliance has on five occasions written to Hon Nomusa Dube-Ncube, MEC of COGTA, to urgently intervene.

Ugu District Municipality needs to be placed under administration and a capable administrator must be employed.

While the MEC has placed numerous other KZN municipalities under administration, MEC Dube-Ncube and the ANC Provincial Government clearly does not care about the situation of Ugu district communities.

The water outages are exacerbated by continuous rolling Eskom blackouts and loadshedding has seriously affected the functioning of pumps.

In addition, the district has no generators in place. President Cyril Ramaphosa was the chairperson of the Eskom war room – current loadshedding is under his watch.

The power will soon be in the hands of voters to change this situation.

Residents have suffered through complete ANC mismanagement and poor service delivery.

It has only been DA councillors assisting communities with information and ensuring that JoJo tanks are filled. Voters must use their votes wisely on May 8.

DR RISHIGEN VIRANNA MPL

DA Ugu Constituency Head

HAVE YOUR SAY

Like our Facebook page, follow us on Twitter and Instagram

At Caxton, every story is written by humans. We use AI only to perform quality checks - never to generate the news. Happy reading!

Support local journalism

Add The Citizen as a preferred source to see more from South Coast Herald in Google News and Top Stories.

Check Also
Close
Back to top button