Water that harms the people is not a right fulfilled — it’s a threat

For three weeks, the taps in Bronkhorstspruit kept running. By the narrow measure South Africa often uses, the system was working. It was not. From 24 September to 14 October, the Bronkhorstspruit Water Treatment Works supplied unchlorinated water. The treatment plant draws from the Bronkhorstspruit River, which the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) says is heavily polluted by sewage from a dysfunctional wastewater works upstream in Victor Khanye and from malfunctioning Tshwane pump stations. Pumps and sand filters at the plant itself were not functioning. Whatever was in the river went into homes at Zithobeni, Rethabiseng, Dark City, Sokhulumi and Bronkhorstspruit. 

Between 7 and 18 October, 408 people were treated for gastrointestinal illness. By 26 October, the figure was 833, of whom 328 were children aged four and under. Stool samples identified norovirus, Campylobacter and Shigella; water samples showed extremely high levels of E. coli. 

No cholera bacteria were found in stool samples, and Mayor Nasiphi Moya says the Vibrio cholerae variant detected in water is not the epidemic strain. No deaths have been reported. While that is fortunate, it is not reassuring. Diarrhoeal disease remains a leading cause of death among children under five, and dehydration can turn a stomach bug into an emergency within hours. 

The DWS investigation also found that the city failed to warn residents that their water was unsafe – even after boiling. Families drank it and washed their babies in it because no one told them not to. 

Moya has acknowledged negligence and commissioned an external inquiry; the Public Protector is investigating. Reports that the city had prior warnings about water quality remain allegations until proven. Moya says the City leadership was unaware the plant had stopped chlorinating. One fact needs no inquiry: the municipality delivered water that could make people ill, and said nothing. 

This is where the Constitution should stop us. Section 27 guarantees everyone the right of access to sufficient water. “Sufficient” has too often been read as a question of quantity – how many litres, how many hours of supply, how many households connected. The Water Services Act does not permit that reading. It defines basic water supply in terms of sufficient quantity and acceptable quality. The law sets two tests, not one. A municipality that delivers plenty of contaminated water has not half-fulfilled the right. It has failed it, because water that harms the people who drink it is not, in any meaningful sense, water supplied. 

Our jurisprudence has largely fought over the first test. In Mazibuko, the Constitutional Court asked how much water the state owed the poor. Bronkhorstspruit asks the question the courts have rarely had to confront so starkly: what kind of water? When a tap delivers sewage-borne pathogens, the issue is no longer only the progressive realisation of a socioeconomic right. It is whether the state’s own infrastructure has become a threat to the right to life in section 11.

That is not rhetorical inflation. Supplying sewage-polluted river water without disinfecting it, and without warning those who will drink it, creates a foreseeable risk of serious harm. It fell hardest on the youngest children, those least able to survive it or protect themselves. Section 24, which promises an environment not harmful to health or wellbeing, and section 152, which charges local governments with providing services and promoting a safe and healthy environment, point in the same direction. 

Dignity

Then there is dignity. Section 10 is not abstract, and its violation is not either. It is being told that the water in your home may now be used only to flush the toilet. It is collecting water in buckets in a democracy three decades old. It is schoolchildren drinking from a broken pipe. And it is hearing the water minister, explaining why so many of the sick were infants, observe that “children, by nature, always have diarrhoea”. To be made dependent on water you cannot trust, and then to hear the harm treated as ordinary, tells citizens what the state believes they are worth. 

My research in the Madibeng Local Municipality, published this year as Water Is There, But It Doesn’t Come, found that residents who endure repeated water failure do not experience it simply as a technical fault. Dry taps, discoloured water, uneven emergency supply and silence from officials accumulate into moral judgements about whether the government regards them as citizens. Some may be mistaken in their particulars; their direction is the point. People read service failure as a verdict on their standing. Bronkhorstspruit compresses years of that experience into three weeks. 

What would taking the right seriously require?

First, treat water quality as an enforceable part of Section 27, not a technical footnote: monitoring results against the national drinking-water standard should be published routinely, plant by plant. 

Second, make warning residents a binding legal duty the moment disinfection fails, with personal consequences for officials who stay silent.

Third, the DWS must use its regulatory powers before children fill hospital wards, not after. 

The plant will be cleaned, and the water chlorinated again. That will restore flow and, eventually, safety. It will not undo the fact that for three weeks, a South African municipality gambled with its residents’ lives and dignity, and made them pay for its failure in their own homes. The constitutional promise was never merely that water would come out of the tap. It was that the water would sustain life rather than endanger it. DM