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- Residents of Harrismith in the Free State are fighting back against municipal decay.
- They are using the courts against the Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality's failure to deliver services and stepping in where they can.
- In the series, On The Road, News24 is traversing the country to gauge South Africans' feelings ahead of the elections.
Several Harrismith residents will tell you that their town was once considered the "jewel of the Free State".
Today, after years of mismanagement by the Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality, the jewel has been reduced to (Harri)smithereens.
But residents aren't merely accepting their fate. They are fighting back - through the courts and a rates boycott, and by doing what they can to improve their living conditions.
Willem König, who has lived in Harrismith since 1997, was instrumental in establishing the Harrismith, Intabazwe, and Tshiame Residents Association (HIT) in 2018. He is the organisation's chairperson.
"Harrismith used to be the jewel of the Free State, years ago, and that has just deteriorated and gone from bad to worse.
"We just decided that we cannot live in this place or trade in this town anymore. This is where our kids are. This is where my grandchildren live, and we cannot allow people ... to live in raw sewage. Nobody deserves to live like that. I don't care who you are," König said.
He added that nothing worked in the town, from water provision to road repairs, to billing and refuse collection, and that the residents association has had to step in to do the municipality's job.
"Refuse hasn't been removed from my house in the last seven years. So, we started to remove the refuse of members," König said.
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Residents association members pay a fee for what are meant to be municipal services, including refuse removal, street sweeping and the general upkeep of the town.
The association comprises about 500 residents from Harrismith who pay for services. Some have joined the ongoing rates boycott in the municipality, paying their monthly rates and levies into a trust account.
He said they would continue to provide critical services that the municipality failed to render because "I don't live in a pigsty", and added that all they could do was "fight this corrupt system".
Motorists travelling to either Johannesburg, Bloemfontein or Pietermaritzburg get to enjoy the gardens and eateries at the Bergview stop.
The colourful flowers and well-manicured gardens are a far cry from what the city centre looks like.
The News24 On The Road team was told that businesses at the Bergview stop must truck in additional water and spend thousands of rand on diesel to keep the lights on, toilets flushed, and stoves running.
The local Spur, owned by Marinus van Sandwyk, has been operating for more than 30 years, but the situation in Harrismith has forced him to consider moving his business elsewhere.
An emotional Van Sandwyk said he was mulling over disinvesting when politics started encroaching on business.
Van Sandwyk explained that one of the challenges for residents and businesses was having municipal buildings located some 50 kilometres outside of town.
"So, any dispute or anything that you need to resolve, you need to resolve somewhere else. And from then on, it started going wrong because the municipality got out of touch completely," Van Sandwyk said. He added that business generated money for the municipality, but the money was not poured back in.
"So that's when we started seeing the real deterioration and the non-maintenance of basic things, like the roads, the electrical infrastructure and even the water systems.
"The sewage works hasn't been working, I think, for the last 12 years or so. It's been absolutely ridiculous what's been happening," he said.
He said he spends R45 000 on diesel and R20 000 on trucking water.
He added:
In 2020, HIT won a case against the municipality when the Free State High Court ordered Maluti-a-Phofung to take all reasonable steps to prevent raw and untreated sewage to flow from the municipal wastewater and sewage management system into Harrismith, to repair and maintain the sewage pumps, and to comply with the legal minimum standard of sewage management.
In 2022, HIT won another case against the municipality after residents' electricity was cut without a dispute resolution process being followed first. The municipality was ordered to restore their electricity and to desist from doing it in the future.
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The Maluti-a-Phofung Municipality, which includes Harrismith, Puthathijaba and Kestell, is in dire financial straits, and has been for years.
The 2023 financial statements the municipality submitted to Treasury showed that, as of 30 June 2023, it had an accumulated deficit of more than R1.3 billion and its total liabilities exceeded its assets by close to R450 million.
There is money coming into the municipality – it received more than R1 billion from the National Treasury in grants and subsidies. The municipality has a budget of around R1.6 billion with its other income.
Its biggest expenses are "employee-related costs of more than R566 million (up from the previous year's R109 million), and bulk purchases of more than R757 million.
But how their money is actually spent is hard to say. Maluti-a-Phofung regularly gets disclaimed findings from the Auditor-General, meaning they have provided insufficient evidence in the form of documentation on which an audit opinion can be based.
"The consumers were not given an opportunity to participate in the decisions that would affect them. They did not receive any of the notices mentioned in the policy referred to above. Proper statements and invoices are non-existent. The process adopted failed to enhance the legitimacy of the decisions to disconnect the electricity. Quite the contrary," Judge Johannes Daffue said in his ruling.
He added that the municipality "did not live up to the constitutional commitment to a responsive and accountable public administration".
Maluti-a-Phofung has long been an ANC stronghold, but in the run-up to the 2021 municipal elections, expelled ANC members formed MAP16, which won control of the municipality. Further political machinations followed, and the municipality is now controlled by the ANC.
According to König, political infighting in the municipality had spilt over to the streets of Harrismith ages ago. He said since MAP16 came into power after the 2021 municipal elections and was working with the ANC, it had "nosedived" even further.
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It was a rainy day when News24 visited Harrismith. It is clear that rubbish collection is not much of a priority. Large pools of dirt collected in potholes on the roads.
A local mechanic, Siphesihle Shabalala, was repairing a logistic truck tyre when he spoke to News24. He said he was inundated with work due to the poor road conditions in Harrismith, and that he could not attend to all calls because the state of the roads meant he could not work.
"At the moment, cars can't safely drive here; you also can't tell the difference between the township and city.
"The road is awful here; it's a big problem. I can't find a spot to work because the roads need to be repaired. It's not easy," Shabalala said.
He added that the state of the road was a crucial factor for him as he approached the 29 May general elections, but he was still determining whether his concerns would be addressed.
"I'm not sure; I am thinking about this: if I vote, what will I be voting for?" he asked.
On Mauritz Street, two men were busy working on several potholes. They didn't look like municipal workers. On closer inspection, the plastic surrounding the newly fixed potholes sported the words: "Build It," the name of a hardware store just metres up the street.
The workers suggested that we speak to "Mister Dricus".
"What we wanted to do was create a better customer feel for the store," said Dricus Greeff, general manager of Build It Harrismith.
"That was where the seed was planted."
"Initially, we started off with just the front sections, that was purely for clients. When we started and saw how simple it actually is, we continued straight around the premises of the store. Whereafter we decided ... we're going to take it street by street and try and assist the community as much as possible," said Greeff.
"Basically, right after we started, most of the community, people like Mayday Alarms, Harrismith Panelbeaters, those guys started doing the same thing."
He said there were few roads that were "still in a decent enough state for a normal vehicle to drive through".
"It's been years of neglect, and it shows."
"In our section here, we feel that the potholes were created, well, mainly by us, with receiving our stock. Mainly, it is large amounts of stock.
"So we did feel obligated to assist as much as possible with that. But with saying that, if the general maintenance on a yearly basis had been done, it wouldn't have come to us having to help."
Asked for his advice for residents and businesses in other towns that face similar difficulties, Greef said: "I know, economically, it is quite difficult out there, especially this year, but if there are any people willing, I'd say, form a community project. See if you can get as many hands as possible in your community and see where you guys can try and accommodate."
