Where government fails – We take control

Where government fails – We take control
cleaning up the illegal dumping site ourselves.

11/05/20202
Ikemeleng
Buti Botopela

I live in an informal settlement located in Rustenburg, establishment over 60 years ago. The settlement made up by mine workers who opted for living out allowance instead of hostel accommodation.
And at that time some companies did not have accommodation for employees so it was were mine workers would have to build their temporary shelters which ultimately ended up being their home and over the years the informal settlement became to multinational mime workers.
Today I and Ntate Ngwenyama decided to clean the illegal dumping site and the street. We raked the waste that gets blown by the wind into our fences and yards, we unfortunately don’t have the capacity to dispose the waste off in an environmental friendly manner so we couldn’t leave it laying around so we decided to burn it off.
Although we contributed to the climate change blueprint, we felt that we have done well to our community and children, livestock and vegetables even though it is a temporary measure but better than nothing.
We hope our local councillor would assists in ensuring that the municipality at least train few of our community members, equip them with waste collection resources and have at least one waste bin or truck to collect waste at least once a week.
It’s now more than ever that our community should get such service as research shown that Covid 19 virus can survive on our surfaces for hours, on boxes and now on semen.
And the waste consists of all those items that the virus easily survive on.