Tulbagh residents, who live in the heart of the Winelands in the Western Cape, complain that their tap water runs brown and smells like human excrement, causing children to fall ill. The municipality, however, insists the water is clean. Every day for the past three weeks, 52-year-old Mina Jankies has begun her day queuing at one of the communal taps in the informal settlement where she lives.
Every time Jankies opens the taps, what flows out is water that “stinks”, water she cannot drink, cook with, or give to her family. “If you come, you will smell,” she said. “The water in the tap, it smells so bad, we can’t even give the water to the kids to drink.” For weeks now, Jankies and other residents of Tulbagh, a small tourist town in the Western Cape, have been faced with tap water so brown, slimy and foul-smelling that some describe it as resembling sewage.
Children, Jankies said, had fallen ill, and so had her father. Yet the municipality insists the water is clean. “We are residents of Tulbagh.
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They must give us water. They are playing with our lives here,” she said. On Monday, 8 December, WaterCAN said that residents had contacted the organisation after “noticing changes in water quality and experiencing health concerns”.
The civil society initiative, which addresses water quality challenges by equipping communities with tools to test their water and hold local authorities accountable, assisted with community-led sampling and conducted preliminary water quality tests using iLab kits. Three samples tested positive for total coliform bacteria, a sign of contamination and a clear indicator that the water is unsafe to drink without being treated. “When test results show the presence of coliform bacteria, it is a clear red flag,” said WaterCAN’s executive manager, Dr Ferrial Adam.
“Safe drinking water is a constitutional right, and immediate precautionary measures are necessary to protect public health.” The organisation urgently called on the Witzenberg Local Municipality to: While the municipality has conducted some testing, residents confirmed that nothing else on the list had happened. WaterCAN’s Adam said five community samples were collected from residents’ homes. “Of the five tests, three were really clear that there was bacteria. People are saying the water comes out brown and yellow and smells of shit,” she explained.
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