With no water tankers delivering relief, many have been forced to take extreme measures to access water. Despite earlier assurances, the municipality has not supplied water tankers, leaving residents in distress. 

Videos and pictures shared on social media show desperate scenes of residents, including the elderly, carrying buckets and collecting water from streams and distant areas.

Resident Keiso Maribe describes the situation as both degrading and dangerous. He says municipal officials told him the municipality owes a service provider four months’ worth of unpaid invoices for water tanker services. 

He also expressed outrage after municipal trucks allegedly delivered unsafe water.

“Yesterday, they sent us trucks with dirty water. I sent them a picture showing the water coming out of the trucks was dirty. They claimed they didn’t send those trucks, and they don’t even know where those people took the water, but those were municipal workers.”

For more than a decade, many residents have endured chronic water shortages in the ailing Masilonyana municipality. The failure to maintain severely damaged water infrastructure has deepened the crisis, contributing to ongoing outages.

Residents had hoped conditions would improve after the Human Rights Commission obtained a court order compelling the municipality to provide clean, adequate water, said Maribe. Instead, disappointment has grown as daily struggles continue.

Masilonyana has repeatedly been in the spotlight for poor governance and deteriorating services. The leadership, including Mayor Dimakatso Modise, has been widely criticised for mismanaging municipal funds and failing to address collapsing infrastructure.

Recently, the troubled municipality suffered another setback when the Free State High Court struck its urgent application off the roll. The application sought to prevent the sheriff from attaching municipal property valued at more than R1 million following the municipality’s failure to pay money owed to its former legal manager, Itumeleng Mogaecho.

The court found the application lacked urgency and noted that Masilonyana’s previous review application against a South African Local Government Bargaining Council (SALGBC) award had lapsed and was legally regarded as withdrawn.

Meanwhile, Modise is among several ANC troika members who were recently instructed to step down. However, she and others have defied the directive, choosing to remain in office despite worsening service delivery failures and rising community frustration.

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OFM News/Kekeletso Mosebetsi mvh