LONGLANDS, Northern Cape — Longlands residents in the Northern Cape have taken their mounting frustration over the Dikgatlong Municipality’s failing water supply to the streets, blockading the R31 highway after enduring another two-week period without running water.
For the community, the current dry spell is merely the latest chapter in a prolonged infrastructure crisis. Local voices reveal that certain neighborhoods have been systematically neglected for years. One resident, whose home is situated on the final street of the area, noted a continuous five-year stretch without water flowing from their tap. Instead, the community is forced to rely on municipal water tankers, a stopgap measure that residents claim has occasionally resulted in severe gastrointestinal issues, including diarrhea.
The physical toll of this crisis is especially harsh on the elderly. Older community members described being reduced to waiting with empty buckets, physically unable to fetch the water themselves and forced to pay others for the basic task. Despite actively documenting these hardships and raising the issue on a dedicated community Facebook page, residents feel their pleas have consistently fallen on deaf ears. With local elections on the horizon, the community is drawing a hard line, expressing deep reluctance to support a municipality that fails to deliver fundamental services.
Addressing the public outcry, a municipal spokesperson acknowledged the severe disruptions but pointed to a combination of external and infrastructural factors. The spokesperson explained that the recent outage was compounded by essential winter maintenance conducted by the Vaal Central Water Board on August 17 and 18, 2026. This scheduled work, combined with critically low reservoir levels, disproportionately impacted Longlands, though the municipality emphasized that the outage did not affect the entire municipal footprint.
To mitigate the immediate crisis, the municipality has deployed additional water trucks to the hardest-hit streets. However, officials stress that this is only a temporary relief measure. The definitive fix, according to the municipal spokesperson, lies in a comprehensive upgrade of the local reservoir and the bulk water pipeline in Delportshoop, a project specifically designed to finally stabilize the water supply for the Longlands area.
Offering a tangible path forward, the municipality confirmed that the necessary funding for the Delportshoop bulk pipeline project has been successfully secured. The upgrade is slated to go out to tender by the end of October, marking a critical next step toward resolving the community’s long-standing water crisis.
