Abstract
South Africa became a democratic state in 1994, and for the first time in the country’s history, individuals of all races were treated equally. The emergence of a new democratic system entailed the development of a new constitution for the country. Chapter 2 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996) stipulates that “[e]veryone has the right to have access to sufficient food and water”. Thus, the Constitution recognises that water is a basic human right. To give effect to this right, the Water Services Act 108 of 1997 was enacted by parliament. The purpose of this Act is to provide for the right to basic water supply and basic sanitation services for the well-being of people and animals. In line with the Water Services Act, municipalities are entrusted with the responsibility of providing water services to communities. The idea is to achieve SDG 6, which is about “clean water and sanitation for all”. However, achieving this goal has proved to be challenging, especially in the global South. This study aimed to assess the sustainability of the water supply and identify the challenges of access to potable water supply in the Madiba and Nqabeni villages in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa. The main objectives of this study were to evaluate how water is accessed by local communities, understand the institutional arrangement for water supply, determine the barriers associated with access to safe drinking water and water management, and investigate the social and economic impacts associated with the lack of access to sustainable water sources on the lives and livelihoods of local communities in the Madiba and Nqabeni villages. To achieve these objectives, interview-administered questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and observations were used as the main data collection techniques in both the Madiba and Nqabeni villages. The study relied on both probability and non-probability sampling. The study relied on systematic sampling to select households from the Nqabeni and Madiba rural areas to be included in the survey. A non-probability purposive sampling approach was used to select the key informants, which included municipal officials, ward councillors and traditional leaders. The questionnaire was analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics (Version 25) at a 5% significance level. Thematic content analysis, a qualitative analytic method of identifying, analysing, and reporting patterns or themes within data, was used to analyse the open-ended questions. Field observations helped to corroborate the questionnaire results.
The results showed that all the respondents (100%; n = 205) in Nqabeni village relied on water from open water bodies (rivers, wetlands, streams, springs and ponds), while in Madiba village,
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70% (n = 92) obtained water from open water bodies, and the remaining 30% (n = 39) relied on the community borehole. The study also found that 17% (n = 35) in Nqabeni and 17% (n = 22) in Madiba bought water from vendors only for drinking and cooking. Thus, water from rivers, ponds and streams was supplemented by water that the community bought from street vendors. The study found that while there were institutional arrangements to remedy the water crises in Madiba village, in Nqabeni village there was no institutional arrangement. Thus, the municipality failed to provide water tanks to the majority for water harvesting. Infrastructural and institutional challenges, as well as corruption and mismanagement of funds, have made it impossible to have access to safe drinking water in the Madiba and Nqabeni villages. At the end, social and economic impacts associated with the lack of access to water were identified. This included travelling long distances, particularly for women and school children to fetch water on a daily basis, constant backaches from carrying water buckets on their heads, consumption of untreated or polluted water, and buying water, which strained their small budgets. Instead of bridging the gap between rural and urban areas in terms of water supply, poor governance and lack of political will merely increase the gap. Thus, despite democracy, the local communities in the study remained without access to water supply and this violated their human rights enshrined in the Constitution.
The study concludes that South Africa is far from achieving Sustainable Development Goal 6. To meet this goal, the study recommends that the government should provide communities with boreholes, repair existing infrastructure, increase the budget for water and sanitation, implement existing policies regarding water, deal with corruption and mismanagement of funds, invest in rainwater harvesting technologies and encourage community participation.