People, baboons and pigs forage at the Ladismith rubbish dump, just off the R62 in the Klein Karoo, on a weekday afternoon. Plastic is impaled like flowers on the surrounding trees and litter mars the neighbouring dorpie of Zoar, which sends its waste to the Western Cape dump.
Meanwhile, the dumps in Emgwenya (Waterval Boven) in Mpumalanga and Makhanda in the Eastern Cape are similar examples of collapsing waste management.
Toxic black smoke pollutes the air above the Emgwenya dump, where refuse has been smouldering for months after a veld fire. Before the blaze, a service provider contracted to clean up the sprawling mess simply pushed it away from the road towards a wetland, and later down a slope towards the Elands River, residents said.
Overflowing dumps, particularly in rural towns and townships, are a symptom of service delivery falling apart countrywide.
Joza township in Makhanda is turning into one large dumpsite, according to its residents. “You will be walking and there will be a diaper here and there. Children are now just jumping over rubbish because it’s a daily occurrence ... we are living in filth,” a resident told researchers.
“Joza residents are drowning in their own waste and have no idea when they will catch a breath of air,” wrote engineer Marc Kalina, first author of a paper published in the journal Environment, Development and Sustainability in May and co-written by Ncebakazi Makwetu and Elizabeth Tilley.
“Illegal dumpsites have grown at former or current municipal collection sites ... and across the unoccupied or marginal land that surrounds the community, such as the veld, in water courses.
“Illegal dumping sites are a common facet of life in South Africa’s townships, where solid waste management services are universally insufficient,” he added.
The picture is not universally bleak, however. Foul dumps can be cleaned up, rehabilitated and replaced with a model system, as Uniondale, east of Ladismith, demonstrates.
Moreover, the national department of forestry, fisheries & the environment (DFFE) has launched a drive to improve waste management in urban and rural municipalities, said Peter Mbelengwa, chief director of communications.
“Through the cleaning and greening programme, the department assists municipalities with the clearing of illegal dumps, picking up litter in prioritised streets, planting trees and promoting recycling services,” he added.
The bad and ugly: Ladismith and Zoar
The funding of waste disposal is a problem in many municipalities and Kannaland, under which Ladismith, Zoar, Calitzdorp and Van Wyksdorp fall, has one of the worst track records of financial mismanagement in the Western Cape.
Kannaland, whose mayor is child rapist Jeffrey Donson, was put under administration by the provincial government in 2018. The late Kannaland municipal manager, Morné Hoogbaard, was charged with defrauding the municipality with three other officials when he was appointed.
Fellow fraud accused Hendrik Barnard, the acting municipal manager of Ladismith, who was appointed after Hoogbaard died on October 12, said they have a waste management system. “Refuse is dumped at the site after it is collected, according to a programme, and it is covered partially.”
Inside the Ladismith waste disposal facility, a gold-toothed heavyweight with a sidekick confronted the Sunday Times photographer, ordering him to delete his pictures or face consequences
The municipality controls access, yet the problem with baboons and pigs is out of their control, he said. “The people are there without our permission.”
Inside the Ladismith waste disposal facility, a gold-toothed heavyweight with a sidekick confronted the Sunday Times photographer, ordering him to delete his pictures or face consequences. The pair closed the gates of the dump, blocking his exit, while two police cars, each with two police officers, pulled up outside the gates. He was only allowed to leave after wiping clean his memory card.
It was “not necessary to act like thieves who broke into a house”, Barnard’s office said of the Sunday Times's conduct when asked about the intimidation.
Professionals contracted to work in Ladismith, where the Independent Civic Organisation of South Africa is in charge, have been threatened for challenging irregularities for decades, even leaving town.
“Budgetary and human resource constraints” prevent the implementation of the Kannaland Integrated Waste Management Plan, said Wouter Kriel, spokesperson for Anton Bredell, the Western Cape MEC of local government, environmental affairs & development planning.
Kannaland’s specialised vehicles for waste management can only be procured in the 2024/2025 financial year. The Western Cape conducts audits and gives officials recommendations on how to improve waste management where there is no or partial compliance, he added.
“The department will seek financial assistance to address the backlogs in waste management for many struggling municipalities in the Western Cape, including Kannaland municipality,” Kriel said.
The good: Uniondale
Uniondale, about 200km further east along the R62 and off the R341, falls under the George municipality and its waste management reflects greater efficiency.
The small town near the Eastern Cape border, whose decommissioned landfill was a “terrible mess” a few years ago, now has a neat transfer station for storing waste. (To be fair, this is a clean operation which cannot be compared to a landfill.)
Site manager Lebua Louw said in 2022 the transfer station, which conducts recycling, was opened after the old dump was decommissioned and rehabilitated. “Every three months the refuse is removed from here and we are busy with a composting project,” said Louw, proud that the surrounding environment is no longer polluted.
Raymond William-Damons, 84, was picking out tins for recycling at the transfer station during our visit, while two young men sorted bags of glass, plastic and cardboard for recycling, for which they get paid hourly.
Local businesses support recycling, said Keith Thyssen, who works at the SSA Supplements factory from which old boxes and plastic wrapping are collected.
“The recycling is well run and the municipality is tidier than before,” said Thyssen, who studied agriculture before returning home to find a job.
Fixing the bad, with garden gnomes and lawyers
All provinces are affected by waste management problems, according to the monitoring of waste management since 2014 by AfriForum in the towns in which it has branches.
By 2022, 82% of those monitored (132 out of 162) had failed to comply with the minimum requirements, up from 69% in 2014. Mpumalanga, the Eastern Cape and the Free State were the provinces with the highest noncompliance in AfriForum's 2022 report.
In Emgwenya, a top destination for rock climbers from around the world, residents have banded together under the campaign “Emgwenya/Boven Reboot” to galvanise the municipality into reviving the town, including fixing the dump, and are preparing to take legal action.
As with Ladismith, their efforts to secure government accountability are constrained by officials facing or convicted of crimes.
Emgwenya town manager and former councillor Themba Nelson Masha and six other men were charged in 2021 with attacking a police officer outside the station in 2020. Residents also protested in 2018 for Masha to be removed, alleging he was linked to a murder.
Like Ladismith, the executive mayor for Emgwenya is based elsewhere, in this case across the N4 in Emakhazeni. Emgwenya councillor Solly Ndimande and Masha referred queries about the waste disposal site to Anza Nefale, the environmental manager for Emakhazeni.
Nefale said he would respond on November 3, but his phone repeatedly went from ringing to engaged during attempts to reach him. Then calls were cut off.
In Makhanda, the streets were cleaned up by more affluent residents ahead of the 2022 National Arts Festival, wrote Kalina in the May paper.
Citizens dressed as gnomes worked to clear an illegal dumpsite, accompanied by a guitarist. In another citizen delivery/performance art event organised by artist Gavin Krastin, they took to the streets with pickaxes, shovels and other tools to patch up potholes.
“The ‘queer artists-come-garden-gnomes’, in collaboration with local artisans and municipal workers, was a commentary on labour in a community in crisis,” they said.
It doesn’t have to be this way
“Makana [the municipality under which Makhanda falls] is just one of many troubled municipalities on the tipping point in South Africa,” they noted.
The “poor townships” will be harmed most by the municipal decline in solid waste management services, warned the authors of “The rich will always be able to dispose of their waste: A view from the front lines of municipal failure in Makhanda, South Africa”.
Historic inequality in service delivery, such as waste collection and management, is likely to worsen, while the wealthy will turn to privatised collection, they predicted.
“Looking towards an uncertain future, the only thing we can be sure of is that there will be many more Makhandas,” they wrote. And Ladismiths and Emgwenyas.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Funding decentralised, community-based solutions which do not depend on the state could fill emerging gaps, the researchers suggested.
These solutions should be a focus of “South Africa’s transition to a circular economy”, with its focus on recycling and reducing waste. “Fostering waste markets while supporting informal waste workers has the potential to ... bolster the [livelihoods of] thousands of informal workers active within the country’s waste sector,” they wrote.
Uniondale’s recycling operation is a symbol of what is possible: cleaning up a town, creating jobs and hope.
The national government acts
DFFE minister Barbara Creecy set aside money in her May budget to help clean up municipalities through 18,000 jobs in the Expanded Public Works Programme.
To assist 58 of them, the DFFE has spent R168m in the past two years on the yellow waste collection fleet, which, among other functions, enables the daily compaction needed for landfill management.
Two pillars of the revised National Waste Management Strategy (2020) which contribute to improved landfill management are:
- The waste minimisation pillar, with a 45% target in five years. In the past two years, the DFFE has supported the diversion of 1.5-million tonnes of paper and packaging and 19,000 tonnes of e-waste to recycling. It has also provided R300m in financial support for 56 start-ups in the waste sector and created 1,559 jobs; and
- The compliance, enforcement and awareness pillar. This includes prioritising 40 landfill sites for improvement.
• Source: Peter Mbelengwa, DFFE chief director of communications
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