Thaba Chweu taps test zero chlorine as sewage reaches the Blyde river
The Mpumalanga municipality at the centre of the Panorama Route is failing the water and wastewater systems its tourism towns are built on, and the businesses paying for it say the fix cannot wait for the next election.
Water drawn from a tap in Mashishing carried no chlorine at all, and sewage was running down the town’s streets and into a river, when the condition of the Thaba Chweu local municipality was checked this month.
Independent sampling carried out by the laboratory iLab together with AfriForum recorded coliform bacteria at a level flagged as unsafe, with alkalinity at a warning level. The Citizen reported the results on 18 September, alongside what its visit to Mashishing, formerly Lydenburg, found: sewage spilling onto streets and into a watercourse.
Thaba Chweu covers Mashishing, Graskop, Sabie and Pilgrim’s Rest, the four towns that carry the Panorama Route, the escarpment drive past God’s Window, Bourke’s Luck Potholes and the Mac Mac Falls that draws domestic and international visitors to Mpumalanga.
What the sampling found
Zero chlorine at a household tap is the finding that matters most for anyone drinking that water. Chlorine is what keeps a supply safe between the treatment works and the kitchen, and the South African National Standard 241 sets the legal and technical limits that water for human consumption must meet.
Ferrial Adam, executive director of WaterCan, said the results showed the water was not safe to drink. She said the starting point was to investigate the water treatment works, establish why the water is unsafe and see whether it can be remedied, and that accountability had to follow.
Marius Opperman, a Democratic Alliance councillor in the municipality, has called on mayor Friddah Nkadimeng to engage her administration and produce a plan to improve water quality. He said the municipality must take note that the national standard applies to water supplied for human consumption, and that the Department of Water and Sanitation requires municipalities to run regular water quality monitoring.
The tourism economy is the water system
Oupa Pilane, chair of the Southern Africa Tourism Services Association board, said the situation was deeply concerning because the municipality sits at the heart of one of the province’s most important tourism regions.
“Graskop, Sabie, Pilgrim’s Rest and much of the Panorama Route depend heavily on tourism for businesses, employment and local economic activity,” he said. “The lack of reliable water supply and the discharge of sewage into rivers are therefore not only service delivery problems, they are tourism and economic development problems.”
Pilane said hotels, guesthouses, restaurants and attractions cannot hold an acceptable standard without a reliable supply, and that operators are installing tanks, boreholes and filtration systems simply to stay open. Those costs land on the competitiveness of the destination.
He said sewage in the rivers is a particular problem on a route sold on its waterfalls, forests and landscapes, and that visitors do not separate the municipality’s job from the provincial government’s or the private sector’s. “They experience the destination as one product,” he said.
Through the Panorama Route Reimagined initiative, the association is pushing for a master plan covering infrastructure, roads, beautification, safety, environmental management and investment. Pilane’s line is blunt: “We cannot market our way out of service delivery failure. We have to fix the destination while we market it.”
What the agencies say
Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency spokesperson Simphiwe Shungube said the agency still needs to assess how the tourism sector is being affected, and that sewage spillage matters must be referred to the responsible authority.
Pompie Ledwaba, president of the Mpumalanga Civic Coalition Movement, said the water and sewage problems have run for years and that protests in the municipality have produced nothing. His movement runs workshops teaching residents how to vote, on the argument that the party in charge is the thing that changes.
The municipality’s own finances are part of the picture. Thaba Chweu spent R103 million more than it earned in the past year, a shortfall reported separately, and a council that cannot balance its books is a council that struggles to fund a treatment works, a pump station or a sewer line.
What it costs the people who live there
A household in Mashishing with no chlorine in the tap is buying bottled water or boiling it, and paying for both. A guesthouse in Graskop with no reliable supply is sinking a borehole and running a filtration plant, and pricing that into a room rate that has to compete with destinations that do not have the problem.
A sewage spill that reaches a river is not only an environmental matter. It is a reason a tour operator reroutes a group, and a rerouted group is a night not sold in Sabie and a shift not offered to a waitress in Pilgrim’s Rest.
The Panorama Route is one of the country’s strongest tourism assets and it is not lost. The falls still run, the potholes are still carved into the rock, and the operators who have kept their doors open through this are the reason visitors still come. What is being tested now is whether the municipality, the province and the national department can get a treatment works and a sewer line right in a place where the entire local economy depends on it.
The results of the sampling have been put to the municipality and to the Department of Water and Sanitation. The next dated step is the water quality monitoring the department requires of Thaba Chweu, and the assessment the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency says it still has to conduct.
Source: The Citizen, Mpumalanga tourism mecca no more as sewage and water crisis deepens, 18 September 2026.
