A decade of waiting - 3000-strong Tshwane community sick and tired of broken promises to provide basic services

About 700 families with 3,000 people in Ga-Rankuwa View Extension 15 informal settlement, Tshwane, have been living since 2012 without toilets, running water or formal electrification.

Fridah Molefe, a mother of three, arrived in 2015. He says she has seen a parade of politicians making promises but doing nothing.

“The DA leader then … came here in 2016 and saw everything. He promised to fix our problems. We gave him a tour of the place to see the squalor we live in. They took photos. They gave us T-shirts and asked us to vote for them. But we never saw them again,” she says.

Today the ward councillor is Violet Phalwane of the ANC. “But nothing has come,” says Molefe. “She can’t even give us a water tanker.

“I use a bucket to relieve myself, and throw it in the bush the following morning. That is very humiliating to me as a woman, but we have no choice,” she said.

“They once brought us bucket toilets, but after four months they took them away. We have no water, and no roads here.”

Illegal connections crisscross the settlement, hooked up to a large transformer that has the smell of an electrical fire. The roads are dirt and mud. Water is fetched from neighbouring RDP houses. Some people syphon water using informal water connections.

Lerato Moobi said she has approached the City of Tshwane to seek services several times.

“It’s raining today, the power will go off, and we have to ask the men in the area to fix it for us,” says Moobi. “We have protested to no avail. We feel like we have been dumped here and people we trusted have disappointed us.”