SOUTH AFRICA: In scenes reminiscent of the apartheid era, South African police recently fired rubber bullets at residents from the Delmas township who began protesting after four locals died from drinking contaminated water.
Following the protests in early October, the authorities conceded that one of the boreholes supplying water to the town, 70km east of Johannesburg, had tested positive for typhoid-causing bacteria which could be traced back to human waste.
"They are not treating us like human beings," Paulos Manana, whose cousin caught the disease, told reporters at the time.
Such instances of public outrage at local municipalities are not isolated in South Africa.
In February this year residents of Phomolong, a township near the mining town of Welkom, went on the rampage, looting local businesses and threatening to attack local officials they believed to be corrupt. Around the same time, another township, Mmamahabane, erupted in violence when residents, trying to publicise their grievances about their local authority, tried to block traffic on a main road by erecting barricades.
Similar episodes of discontent about the poor delivery of services have erupted on a near weekly basis across the Free State, Western Cape and central South Africa provinces over the past 12 months. And it would appear for good reason.
According to the latest UN Human Development report, 13 per cent of South Africa's population still has no access to clean drinking water. In many townships the "bucket system", which involves the manual removal of human waste by municipalities from homes when there is no sewage system, is still widely used despite promises by municipalities that it would be replaced with a modern system.
Kevin Allan, a former adviser to the minister for provincial and local government, wrote in South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper this week that the inability of local municipalities to deliver services was down to the difficulties associated with transforming a local government system poisoned by apartheid.
"Addressing this required a radical reconceptualisation of local government: new structures for democratic representation and decision-making and, most importantly, to deal with the years of exclusion and under-investment in the areas where most people lived," he said.
He added that a key factor that undermined this transformation was the increased size of municipalities - some three times as large as they were during apartheid - which have to rely on the same tax base as before.
Research director at South Africa's Human Sciences Research Council Dave Hemson said the unrest was likely to continue.