In mid-2015, independent laboratory tests confirmed what residents of Makhanda (then Grahamstown) had long suspected: the municipal water supply was contaminated with E. coli at levels that made it unsafe to drink. The source was straightforward — the Makana Local Municipality had failed to maintain its water treatment infrastructure.
What made the Makana crisis iconic was the municipal response. Officials, unable to operate their own treatment plants, purchased R41,000 worth of swimming pool chlorine tablets to treat the municipal water supply. This single detail — swimming pool tablets for a town's drinking water — captured the absurd incompetence of cadre-deployed officials attempting to manage infrastructure they didn't understand.
For months, residents in parts of Makhanda had no access to clean water. The municipality's infrastructure continued to deteriorate. By 2018, the Unemployed People's Movement (UPM) — a civic organisation — decided to take the matter to court. In a landmark 2020 judgment, the Eastern Cape High Court ordered the Premier of the Eastern Cape to invoke Section 139 of the Constitution and intervene in Makana Municipality.
This was historic: the first time a South African court had ordered provincial intervention in a failing municipality. The judgment established that citizens have a constitutional right to functional local government, and that courts can enforce this right when provinces fail to act.
But the legal victory was pyrrhic. Provincial intervention, when it finally came, proved as ineffective in Makana as it had everywhere else. The municipality's problems were structural — cadre deployment had replaced competent engineers and accountants with politically connected appointees. No amount of external oversight could fix what was fundamentally a problem of institutional capture.
As of 2025, Makana remains dysfunctional. The water crisis continues. The court-ordered intervention established an important legal precedent but failed to deliver clean water to the people of Makhanda. The swimming pool tablets remain the most memorable image of municipal collapse in South Africa.