Durban - uThukela District Municipality in Ladysmith has revealed it suspects its workers sabotaged its infrastructure, leaving thousands of people without water for days, in order to force the municipality to approve overtime work.
The community of Ezakheni Township outside Ladysmith were without water for several days after the valves that allow water to be pumped into the township and other suburbs were closed and vandalised. The vandalism of infrastructure came to light a few months ago.
UThukela mayor Inkosi Ntandoyenkosi Shabalala said they suspected the vandalism was linked to demands for overtime. He warned that should it be confirmed workers were behind the sabotage, they would face the consequences.
Shabalala said: “The area of the Ezakheni had been without water for a few days, and when we checked we could not find any obvious reasons, like water leaks.
“We then assembled a team of trusted staff who have been with the municipality for a long time to try to trace the source of the problem.
“After checking, they found that the three big valves that allow for water to be pumped into the township had been closed; not only were they closed, they were damaged with an angle grinder to make sure it was impossible to just open them (manually) again.”
He added they had appointed a contractor who had managed to open two of the three valves, and was working on opening the third.
“We suspect that this is related to our efforts to clamp down on the abuse of overtime.”
The Mercury understands from officials that the workers in the water unit were claiming in excess of R4 million in overtime pay each month.
“In uThukela, the overtime is abused. You find that work like patching a pipe that would take two workers 30 minutes to do, will take them four days. This is therefore among the things that we need to monitor. We need to make sure that the amount of hours claimed correspond to the amount of time it takes to do the work,” the mayor said.
He said to ensure this did not happen again, they would be looking at installing computerised valves.
He also spoke on the general state of water infrastructure in the area, saying the pipes were old and constantly break and leak.
“We need to replace the infrastructure, and for a district as big as uThukela we would need upward of a billion rand to replace these pipes.”
DA Councillor in uThukela, Thys Janse van Rensburg, said they had received reports of people working 80 hours of overtime each month.