The Daily Necessities Are Hard To Secure

The daily necessities in Mdantsane are still not guaranteed and are hard to get whilst we reach the end of the second decade of South Africa's independance.

The water and sanitation situation is a very challenging one to deal with. The number of households in Mdantsane has grown tremendously over the years and there has been a great influx of people from the rural areas as well.

And with so many additional households, many of them informal, the pressure on the water pumps and water points reaches critical levels. We are talking about public water pumps and water pumps outside the compunds. With low pressure the water becomes difficult to get and sometimes only sparse amounts are already available to each household. Maintenance is another problem.

The water is used for everything from cleaning clothes, cooking, drinking, bathing, and cleaning the house. Having very little water accessible to each section makes it very hard to get enough water for a day per household. There are attempts to improve this situation through modernizing the main water supply system and to add more pumps in each section of the township.

But still many hoseholds do not have water taps in side their house which means " keep a bucket close by" because the water has to be fetched.

As you drive through the streets, not only the streets of  Mdantsane but of every township in South Africa, it is hard not to see the overload of electrical wires strung from the trees leading to the only power box in a section. Hundreds of wires come from one power box because the residents of the area were not given access to the electricity. So illegal and sometimes dangerous connections were set up because people do need electricity. 

Every house in the area has a wire coming out of it and every wire is known by the owner in order to fix problems as soon as they arise. The municipality is tearing down these wire frequently but they are back up the next day.

All this shows us that service delivery has not been the Government's strength

Transport? Let's leave this for another time. If you have to go somewhere you have to walk in many cases and the walk can be a long one.
But still in the face of all those atrocities and poverty, there is so much heartfelt friendliness in Mdantsane.
They are simply THE HEROES OF DAILY LIFE!