The Ngaka Modiri Molema District Municipality in Mahikeng in the North West said it’ll solicit President Cyril Ramaphosa’s intervention on the recurrent acts of vandalism of water infrastructure across the municipality.
Water infrastructures in four of the five local municipalities within the district (Mahikeng, Ditsobotla, Tswaing and Ramotshere Moiloa local municipalities) has been vandalised in what the Executive Mayor, Khumalo Molefe believes is a powerful, equipped and fully armed syndicate hell-bent on destroying the municipality’s water infrastructure.
Speaking on YOUFM Newshour, Molefe said that the syndicate has been operating within the district for some time, comprising some unscrupulous businessmen, contractors, some municipal officials and politicians who benefit from the vandalism.
“The modus operandi of this syndicate is the same across our municipalities.
“We believe it is trying to put us under pressure to reverse our long-standing decision to discontinue outsourcing water tankering services in the municipality.
“This is the same system that led to the municipality losing billions of rands and that which the auditor general warned us against for several years.
“We have realised that there’s deliberate vandalism because they don’t take anything, they just destroy the infrastructure and leave it like that,” said Molefe.
According to the mayor, some businesspeople might be taking advantage of vulnerable youth and using them to vandalise water infrastructure.
“Secondly, we came up with the plan to form what is called a panel of contractors and a panel of consultants and we suspect that some of them are recruiting desperate young unemployed people to ransack municipal infrastructure.
“These are the young people they are using to lead protest action to put under-pressure to procure services from them,” cautioned Molefe.
Furthermore, the mayor has defended his suspicions that municipal officials and politicians are involved in the syndicate.
“There are some of the municipal officials arrested in Ditsobotla and there are other people who are arrested alleging that they were sent by municipal officials to vandalise water infrastructure.
“But if you can look closer into some so called service delivery protests, you can realise that some of them are financially sponsored because these young people are transported by buses or minibus taxis and supplied with food on their way to the protests, and we are sometimes told who are behind some of these protests,” alleges the mayor.
Molefe said that despite opening cases of vandalism of municipal infrastructure with the police none of the cases has been resolved.
“We have so far opened around 70 to 80 cases, but they’re still unresolved. I called our District Development Model champion Mondli Gungubele, who is the Deputy Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies, informing him about this. We ended up calling the National Police Commissioner General Fannie Masemola to report this matter to him,” explained Molefe.
The municipality said it intends to write to the President to request his intervention on the matter.
“Eskom was under attack at some point and through the President’s intervention it was restored, and stability was brought back to the parastatal. He also intervened during the killings of politicians and established a political killings task team that dealt with the matter. “We believe our water infrastructure is under attack, water is a right and water is life.
“What we are humbly requesting is for the president to intervene like he did at Eskom and on political killings,” pleaded Molefe.
In addition, Molefe said that the repairs of the vandalised infrastructure across the district will require millions of rands.
“So far, I can estimate about R500m that we would need to repair the destroyed infrastructure, but we use our operations and maintenance to repair the infrastructure.
“In Seweding village in Mahikeng, a sewerage pipe was deliberately destroyed with stones leading to overflowing of sewage on the streets and that will need around R15m to repair.
“In the Ramotshere Moiloa to repair the water infrastructure that was vandalised we would need between R5m-R8m budget,” Molefe concluded.
