Cilliers Brink, a Democratic Alliance politician who was mayor of Tshwane, the municipality that manages Hammanskraal, says a potential solution could be for the local government to buy its own tankers.
“That will still be open to some abuse. However, you’d take the incentive away from contractors. If the municipality operates these tankers by themselves, you take the outside incentive away, and that will also save a great deal of money. But obviously, the longer-term solution must be to fix infrastructure.”
Brink, mayor from 2023-4 and running to be in charge once again, says the current municipal administration has failed to manage the situation.
For Ferrial Adam, buying tankers is not a sustainable solution.
“It’s not viable. In the city of Johannesburg, they might have to do that. But whether it can be done all across the country, I don’t know.
“In smaller towns we could find better solutions than water tanks, like using borehole water. But water tanks must be a very short-term measure for when there’s an outage or a drought. They mustn’t be the norm. And for many communities right now, they have become the norm.”
In Hammanskraal, a couple of car washers are filling up at a public tap while in the background, tankers refill. For every car washed, the workers walk 2km, carrying heavy water containers in wheelbarrows every time. Water shortages make the daily lives of the country’s poorest even more difficult.