Tired of waiting, Limpopo villagers lay their own water pipes

In the villages of Ha-Matsa near Louis Trichardt, residents have never had access to treated drinking water. Instead, they rely on untreated fountain water and boreholes. While they wait for the government to finish long-awaited water projects, residents are making their own plans to get water.

Accessing clean water is a daily struggle in Ha-Matsa’s villages, which are home to nearly 5,000 people. Ha-Matsa has one municipal borehole and two reservoirs, but it is not pumping enough water and it takes almost five days to fill the reservoir.

Some households have drilled private boreholes, but most of them have dried up. “Even though we can get sick from sharing water with animals, we don’t have a choice,” said resident Constance Khakhu, who lives with a leg disability. She drilled a 60-metre borehole in 2010, but it dried up after four years. She extended it by 30 metres but “only found mud”. 

Another resident, Elina Davhana, said her family’s borehole also dried up within five years.

Some residents walk more than two kilometres to buy water from residents with functioning boreholes, where a 20-litre container costs between R3 and R5, and a drum costs R90. Others hire donkey carts to transport water.

There are also residents who own trucks and deliver water to others, charging about R1,200 to fill a 2,400-litre tank.

MAKING A PLAN

There is a nearby mountain spring, with untreated water, where residents use a community-managed rotational system to share the limited supply.

In response to the ongoing shortages, residents raised R12,000 — about R50 per household — to buy pipes and connect directly to the spring. With help from unemployed local young people, they laid a basic piping system linking the spring to old communal taps installed during apartheid.

The system has been running for three years and was recently upgraded with larger-diameter pipes to improve water pressure. But maintenance is a challenge. Frequent pipe bursts require constant repairs.

When we recently visited the village, some residents were seen walking more than 3.5km to fix damaged pipes, while others pushed wheelbarrows to collect water from homes with functioning boreholes.

“It’s not easy to maintain because the pipes are low quality,” said community coordinator Khathutshelo Matsa. “We’re asking for donations so we can buy stronger pipes and extend the system.”

Residents have also built a small stone-and-cement wall at the spring to collect and filter out leaves and unwanted materials debris before the water flows downhill. They want to fence off the area to prevent animals from contaminating the water, but say several requests for municipal assistance have gone unanswered.

UNFINISHED GOVERNMENT PROJECTS

Ha-Matsa traditional authority leader Khosi Vho Philemon Matsa said the community feels abandoned. “Our people are risking their health using water shared with animals because their pleas for help have been ignored.”

Vhembe District Municipality spokesperson Matodzi Ralushai said the villages are included in the municipality’s medium-term plan to drill new boreholes this financial year.

Ralushai said the villages will also benefit from Phase 4 of the Mutshedzi Water Treatment Plant project, which started in 2021 and was supposed to be completed by June 2025 at a cost of R664-million for the entire project. He said that the project is progressing well and the revised completion date is 30 August 2024.

The project has faced several challenges, including “a four-month delay in budget maintenance approval, late delivery of construction materials by foreign suppliers, and heavy rainfall during February, March and April 2025. There was also community unrest in Dzanani, which was not related to the project but still disrupted progress,” Ralushai said.

He said that as a temporary measure, water is being supplied through water tankers. An additional borehole in the nearby village of Manyii was meant to supplement Ha-Matsa’s supply, but cable theft and vandalism have delayed the plan.

This article was published with the Limpopo Mirror.