Imagine waking up to raw sewage flooding your property.
Imagine some of this making its way into your home.
Not just once, but regularly. For a year.
Despite the health implications, and general disgustingness of the situation, several municipal contractors later and the situation has not changed.
But the Barth family's experience is just one symptom of a district-wide malaise afflicting the municipality’s sewage infrastructure, which ensured that some of the city’s beaches remained closed over the holidays.
This is an appalling situation but, again, symptomatic of a wider, nationwide, malaise afflicting the country’s public infrastructure.
And nowhere is this more apparent than in the state of Eskom’s power-generation units, which continue to fail despite hundreds of billions in bailouts and the high, still rising, cost of electricity.
We are being asked to pay more and more for services which are simply not being delivered.
At municipal level we pay rates for services which are not delivered ‒ a year after being requested.
However, we may have some good news to report in the Barths’ case next week, because municipal spokesman Msawakhe Mayisela, who we asked to comment on the matter, has promised to look into the situation and come back with ‒ hopefully helpful ‒ answers.
This is what is required in our public institutions: one ‒ dare we hope for more? ‒ conscientious individual not afraid to say “this is not acceptable”, and who then takes the requisite action to remedy the matter.
One would hope that that person would be the president, but that’s probably asking for too much.
The Independent on Saturday