POLOKO TAU
WHILE shack dwellers elsewhere would prioritise houses and electricity, residents of eMalahleni informal settlement in Soweto would rather have toilets delivered first.
Residents said while there had been much moaning about unenclosed toilets elsewhere, they were still relieving themselves in the reeds along Klip River, running at the bottom of their settlement.
A community leader, Thembalakhe Jani, said the settlement – nestled between the railway lines up to Nancefield station and Nancefield hostel in Klipspruit – was made up of more than 800 shacks.
“That is possibly more than 3 000 people faced with inhumane living conditions on a daily basis. The reeds down there is where everybody goes to relieve themselves, and that’s not how people are supposed to live,” Jani said.
“People are saying in our community meetings ‘give us toilets’ and everything else can follow. It is very degrading for us to be still using the bushes as toilets at this time.”
Jani said it was also unsafe, “especially for women to go down to the reeds at night, and they’re forced to cover it up in the shacks and throw it away in the morning”.
“There has been cases where two women were attacked while sitting in the reeds in the past year. We have seen people turn down supply of portable toilets and destroy corrugated iron sheet-covered toilets; we’d really appreciate anything that could make us feel like human beings again.”
Resident Nombi Masege said while there were other basic needs in eMalahleni, they would rather have toilets before anything else. “I don’t have words to describe the places we go to relieve ourselves. It is bad, unhygienic and degrading for us,” she said.
Masege said life in the rural areas was by far better than the squalid living conditions at eMalahleni.
“Everything is a struggle here. We make coal out of some muddy soil and concrete we dig around this area,” she said.
Jani said service delivery was nonexistent in the settlement.
“We had no water, and residents had to contribute money to buy pipes so that we can make illegal water connections to the settlement. Now we have two taps with low water pressure shared by all the people here,” Jani said.
“Some people here have called this settlement home for more than two decades. All this time we have been voting, filled in many forms for RDP houses and waited, and we are still are,” he added.
This might be a long wait as the City of Joburg said residents of eMalahleni were land invaders. The city’s housing spokeswoman, Bubu Xaba, claimed that the informal settlement was “unfortunately developed by community leaders who charge for rent and they have in fact invaded the land they are on”.
Xaba said that as a result, the city did not have any development plans for eMalahleni.
But this was denied by Jani, who said the settlement had been in existence for a long time.
“No one is paying rental to anyone here. The city has tried to evict us but we managed to negotiate and stop that, and now we’re expecting service delivery from them,” Jani said.