UMHLATHUZE - Water challenges continue to grip the country and for the communities of uMhlathuze in KwaZulu-Natal, the woes are both medical and economical.
Water outages are washing away Investor confidence in uMhlathuze. It's bad news for KwaZulu-Natal's third-largest economic hub. And, for residents it's bringing not only hardship, but disease.
The municipality is, however, pointing the blame at the community.
Resident Sibongiseni Shabangu said they have to trek 2 kilometres every day to fetch water from a river.
It's a frequent and exhausting necessity, often under intense heat.
The water is later purified for household use.
“We are really concerned as members of the community; this water situation affects almost everything we do."
"Our homes and local businesses around the area are struggling, and as a community, we have already experienced losing water for two months. It’s very difficult because some are also affected in schools, which disrupts learning. Many are complaining, and some even have to fetch water from unsafe places."
uMhlathuze mayor Xolani Ngwezi is pointing the finger right back at the community.
"Not only in this city or municipality if we don't address the issue of planning together with the municipality, amakhosi. Especially amakhosi in this province have got powers to allocate land and the speed at which the community of amakhosi are expanding is a speed that that the municipality cannot plan for."
The Zululand Chamber of Commerce's Mike Patterson said the outages are harming residents, affecting business, and damaging investor confidence.
"The issue is when water gets wasted we become very concerned and the municipal figures show that a lot of water is not paid for whether you can call that wastage or not, but it is used illegally by some illegal connections and yes we have old infrastructure in the town of Empangeni and Richards bay and there is often pipe breaks and give a lot of problems."