Municipality gets 21 days to resolve sewerage problem
Faced with evidence of extensive sewage pollution throughout Komatipoort, the Mpumalanga High Court on Friday ordered the Nkomazi Municipality to clean up its act.
The Daily Maverick reports that chronic water shortages have also bedevilled the town and the municipality was ordered to comply with its constitutional obligation to supply potable water.
‘The waste disposal sites and sewerage works in Komatipoort are not well managed and therefore need urgent attention as these are the causes of the sewage spills encountered,’ the judgment reads.
It ordered the first three respondents – the municipality, the municipal manager and the mayor – to ‘urgently take remedial steps to stop the raw sewage spills by immediately fixing the causes of the spillages and to remedy the effects of the pollution caused, and to rehabilitate the affected areas’.
The respondents were ordered to file a report to the registrar of the court within 21 days on the steps taken to address the matter.
The applicant in the case, the Komatipoort Despondent Residents Association, was authorised by the court to employ an expert to monitor the sewerage works for 12 weeks, for which the municipality will have to pay.
Association chairperson Lené Roux told DM that the problem had been festering for years.
‘We are struggling to cope with sewage spilling everywhere, and the smell. We have a family guesthouse, it overlooks the Kruger Park, and some days you can smell the sewage in the dining room and the bedrooms,’ she said.
In 2019, the HRC found that Nkomazi and two other Mpumalanga municipalities were in violation of the Constitution ‘as a result of their continued failure to effectively address the challenges of sewage spillages and the inadequate treatment of effluent within their jurisdictions’.
It also found that they had contravened the National Water Act and the National Environmental Management Act owing to their ‘failure to prevent and remedy the effects of environmental pollution, in the course of providing sanitation services to their residents’.
Article disclaimer: While we have made every effort to ensure the accuracy of this article, it is not intended to provide final legal advice as facts and situations will differ from case to case, and therefore specific legal advice should be sought with a lawyer.
