Download PDFWalking through the streets of Palmridge, ext. 10, there is a lot of dumping sites are not monitored and no one cares about the health of the people who stay close to the heap of rubbish. I spoke to a few people who stays near the dump site on 21 February 2023.
One of the community leaders, street committee member, Hilton Geduld (65) said, “The Councillor of this ward is very ignorant. We’ve tried calling him to a meeting to attend to the needs of the community but he has never shown up and his excuse is he’s always busy.” While the interview was ongoing, two children with a rubbish bin appeared and dumped the contents next to a road. The veteran then reacted and said, “this is what I’m always complaining about at the meetings, that parents shouldn’t send kids to dump cause they just dump anywhere and you can’t say anything to the kids,” he added by saying, “we held a meeting here and agreed to hire a trucker to remove all this rubbish. And, [after] we did that it was clean for only a week or so, after that, it was back to ‘normal’. We don’t have the big rubbish bins and we went to ask for it at the municipality office and they told us that we are at a new development and no budget was allocated for us.”
Agnes Morake (53) told Karibu! about the difficulties of living next to a dump site and looking after the neighbours’ children.
“We suffer a lot of bad smells from the rubbish, and we can’t open windows during the day cause of [the] smell and the flies. People throw [used] nappies and their rubbish without burning them, if it’s windy, we encounter a problem of rubbish flying to our yards cause it’s not burned, We’ve tried to encourage the community to burn their rubbish by burning ours but still they don’t do it, So, we saw it was pointless to talk in the meeting cause it always ends up in a huge argument, so we went [and] asked a delegation to go to the Councillor.” The delegation had no luck and the community still has the dump site. “We’re hardly seeing the value of our houses and we don’t enjoy cooking and eating cause of the flies and the smell,” said Morake.
When asked how the environment affects the children that she looks after, she said “it kills me to use Doom every now and then cause it affects the kids lungs. Two of them developed flu out of nowhere and sometimes the weather doesn’t allow you to stay outside cause it’s cold or raining but on the other hand, you need to spray [as] the flies are too much, so it’s not good at all my dear.”
The Customer Care Centre office confirmed that Councillor Sanele Ngubane of Ward 61 was available for an interview but not in person.
This article was submitted on 23 February 2023. You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and Karibu! Online (www.Karibu.org.za), and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
