Achmad Brinkhuis of Chamomile Farming Enterprise in the Schaapkraal area says they couldn’t save anything.
“We have no products to supply to Shoprite. The water just keeps rising and the tractors can’t get in. We also can’t access the land we rent from the Department of Agriculture.”
He believes that if the City of Cape Town had maintained the canals – referred to as ditches by the locals – the floods could have been avoided. According to him, he has been warning the city about this for years.
“I can show you emails from 2020, 2019 to the city, where I said, ‘if you don’t open the canals, my gardens will flood’.”
Brinkhuis says the municipality should treat the floods as an emergency. “No one comes out; you keep calling, they log it, but nothing happens.”
Canal system helps manage stormwater
The canal system plays an important role in managing stormwater. According to a post on the Philippi Horticultural Area (PHA) Food & Farming Campaign’s Facebook page, land speculation, illegal land use, illegal dumping and the municipality’s failure to protect and upgrade the canal system over the past six years have led to more farmland being flooded after the recent rains.
In addition to the City of Cape Town’s responsibility to keep the canals clean and maintained, there is also a problem with residents using the canals as a dumping ground. However, Brinkhuis believes the municipality has also failed in its duty to ensure this does not happen.
Jackie Ruppersberg, a local resident, wrote on the PHA Facebook page that the municipality cleaned and upgraded canals on her property but there has never been so much water. “Owners are now pumping water off their properties onto the roads.”
She added that people throw trash and tyres into the canals. “We need people who will check the canals on a daily basis.”
‘People don’t understand the role of canals’
According to the PHA’s Facebook page, people in the area don’t understand the role of the canals and don’t care about it either. “To them, it’s a place to dump things.”
If the City of Cape Town cared about the PHA’s concerns, it would have improved the canal system by making ditches in the roads, said people posting on the page. According to them, this would have greatly reduced the occurrence of floods in Schaapkraal, Knole Park and Highlands Estate.
The City of Cape Town was approached for comment on Tuesday but no response has been received yet.
