Workers in uThukela District Municipality, Ladysmith are suspected to have sabotaged its infrastructure, leaving thousands of people without water for days.
UThukela mayor Inkosi Ntandoyenkosi Shabalala said he suspects that they did so in order to force the municipality to approve overtime work.
For several days, Ezakheni Township outside Ladysmith was without water after the water valves for suburbs were closed and vandalised. The vandalism of infrastructure came to light a few months ago.
Shabalala warned that should it be confirmed that workers were behind the sabotage, they would face the full wrath of the law.
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 explained that they had appointed a contractor who 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.”
“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.
Democratic Alliance (DA) Councillor in uThukela, Thys Janse van Rensburg, said they had received information about people working 80 hours of overtime each month.
In September, the DA marched down Kandahar Avenue in Ladysmith to handover a memorandum to the uThukela District Municipality with grievances and proposals regarding the persistent water outages.