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Residents still waiting for Zuma promises

A BETTER life for all still remains a mirage for the residents of Muyexe in Giyani this festive season - almost two years after President Jacob Zuma identified the area as a nodal point for rural development.

Water, electricity and access roads are still top priorities for the residents, while thousands of others still use bushes and valleys as toilets because of a lack of running water.

During his visit to the area weeks before his first State of the Nation address, Zuma promised residents their years of living life beyond the poverty line would soon be a thing of the past.

Zuma told the residents he would ensure that the government provided adequate resources to the area in an effort to better their lives.

Zuma also promised to provide shelter for the homeless, clean drinking water for every household, good health conditions, electricity, food security and good access roads.

But two years after the announcement only a few of those promises have been kept.

Residents still walk many kilometres to fetch firewood for cooking and buy water at exorbitant prices from those with boreholes in their yards.

Grace Selowa, one of the residents, told Sowetan that she and her neighbours buy water at R1 for a 20-litre container.

"Those who do not have money, share the nearby river with wild animals," Selowa said. "When the president visited the village last year we thought life would change instantly.

"Little did we know that it would take years to live like any other citizen who cast his vote during the national government elections."

The local government department said yesterday they had built hundreds of pit toilets for the villages since 2008.

The Limpopo provincial government said it had provided the villages with one Thusong Service centre, a post office, library, computer laboratory, early childhood development centre, an ablution block at the secondary school and had renovated the clinic and some schools.

Acting spokesperson Tebatso Mabitsela said the government had also successfully provided the villages with 28 vegetable tower gardens, 280 poultry projects and backyard gardens and 487 Jojo tanks for rainwater harvesting.

Mabitsela said the government had also provided the Mopani district municipality with R90million to fast- track a water project that would supply clean drinking water from the Nandoni Dam to Giyani and surrounding villages.

But Mabitsela could not say how far they had gone in connecting electricity to the villages.

Joshua Matlou of the Mopani district municipality, said work was under way to connect a huge pipe from the Nandoni Dam that would supply clean water to communities around Giyani and Modjadjiskloof.

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