No place to hide for BCM in sewage pollution scandal

The South African Human Rights Commission has stripped away every excuse Buffalo City Metro has clung to for years. Its findings leave little room for ambiguity — the municipality’s failure to maintain its wastewater infrastructure is not merely a service delivery lapse. It is a violation of the constitutional rights of the people it is supposed to serve.

For more than a decade, this publication has documented the decay of the West Bank Wastewater Treatment Works. This crisis has unfolded in plain sight while the municipality lurched from one explanation to another. Now the commission has supplied what no amount of political spin can erase — independent scientific evidence showing alarming levels of E.coli.

Those figures represent polluted ecosystems, damaged tourism, threats to public health and a municipality that has failed in one of its most basic obligations. Even more disturbing is the metro’s apparent contempt for accountability. The commission says it repeatedly asked for some reports and documents.

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It even sent courtesy reminders. All of them were ignored. As a result, the commission was unable to determine whether known failures had even been investigated, let alone corrected.

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