Rhodes University research uncovers the resilient people keeping Makhanda’s water flowing against all odds

Date Released: Wed, 12 November 2025 09:04 +0200

When Rhodes University’s recent graduate Terri Harris set out to study Makhanda’s water management system, she wasn’t just conducting academic research; she was probing a question that many in the small Eastern Cape town ask daily: why isn’t the water coming?

“I have seen the immense frustration that the community feels regarding the municipality, I have even felt it myself,” Harris recalls. “However, I have always struggled to see things as black or white. I wanted to understand why – why the water, a basic human right, wasn’t coming, why the roads were broken and riddled with potholes and why our electricity kept cutting out?”

Her Master’s thesis, A Constant State of Failure: Characterisation of the Water Management System of a Small South African Town, offers a rare and revealing look into the socio-technical workings of a community’s lifeblood: its access to water. Drawing on her background in holistic systems thinking, Harris was able to unpack the complex reasons behind Makhanda’s fragile water system, explore pathways for improvement, and highlight lessons other towns could learn to prevent the same failures.

Supervised by Mr Andrew Todd in Rhodes University’s Department of Human Kinetics and Ergonomics, and Dr Matthew Weaver from Rhodes University’s Institute for Water Research, Harris applied a Human Factors and Ergonomics (HFE) approach to municipal water management. A modified version of the Systems Initiative for Patient Safety (SEIPS) model, developed by Carayon and Smith in 2000, helped her map how people and processes interact within Makhanda’s water system. By comparing work as done with work as imagined, she was able to uncover the system’s true strengths and weaknesses.

Seeing systems, not just symptoms

“The Ergonomic approach enables a holistic understanding to systems,” Harris explains. “I was able to uncover the nature behind the interactions between people and other stakeholders in the system, the various stakeholders’ tasks, the tools they use for these tasks, the organisation they work within and the environment surrounding them.”

By viewing the municipality’s water system as a living network of human effort, tools, tasks and organisations, Harris could trace how decades of decisions and indecisions led to what she calls a “drift toward failure”.

“The ‘drift to failure’ is depicted by Makhanda’s slow drift from once having a stable water supply to the gradual decline in supply caused in part by, system vacancies, financial mismanagement, a lack of physical and mechanical resources and inadequate, brittle infrastructure, which slowly and quietly broke down until there were breakdowns everywhere,” she says. “Currently, the system sees multiple systemic failures that cannot be fixed in a timely manner due to there just being too many breakdowns and no resources to attend to them.”

Her analysis shows how the town’s past decisions ripple forward. When the municipality stopped allocating 10% of its budget to infrastructure maintenance in the late 1990s, the logic seemed sound. The infrastructure was still healthy, and funds were needed to redress the injustices of apartheid. But the budget line never returned. “As the years passed and infrastructure began to age, it started to break down without the budget to fix it,” Harris explains. “Now Makhanda sits in a situation where they have an overwhelming amount of system breakages and no financial resources to fix them.”

Human resilience amid systemic strain

Harris’s research doesn’t only reveal what’s broken; it highlights what’s still working, often against all odds. “Despite system mismanagement and shortages of resources there are people in the system that try their best with the little they have for the system to keep chugging along,” she says.

These acts of ingenuity are both inspiring and heartbreaking. “Employees showcased resilience through practises such as creating their own office seats out of old car seats and metal cages,” she says. “They made their own nets to clean the settling tanks at James Kleynhans (Water Treatment Facility) with old sticks, poles and material that they found lying around. They stopped pump stations from flooding by making seals out of rubber they find on the floor, went to neighbouring farms to ask to borrow various tools, and learnt how to perform some tasks belonging to the plumbing teams.” Often, extreme and urgent adaptations were needed to keep the system functioning through its difficult circumstances.

Some even dig trenches with their bare hands when tools are missing. Many work unpaid overtime or buy their own stationery for their paper-based reports just to keep water flowing. “Often a bad system can outweigh good people despite their best intentions,” Harris reflects. “But these individuals show that the human spirit within the brittle system is not broken.”

From blame to belonging

Harris’s work also uncovers a deep psychological fracture in Makhanda’s water management system: a lack of trust and communication between those at the top and those in the trenches. “Quotes from participants in my research include: “they don’t even know our names” and “we just want to be heard”,” she shares. “Currently this lack of systemic integration has resulted in a system that is fighting itself.”

Her recommendations, though simple, could start healing that divide. “The biggest actionable change that the municipality can instil right now is to set up a meeting with all organisational stakeholders from the top of the system down to the bottom to improve communication channels and feedback loops,” she says. Creating spaces where workers feel “seen and heard” can help transform frustration into collaboration.

Another solution is to “leverage the good in the system”, Harris adds, to celebrate those employees who keep the wheels turning despite adversity. This can have a positive knock-on-effect. Recognition can boost morale, foster trust and even restore community faith. “Improved trust in the system can then lead to increased support, which can lead to more consistent payment of rates and taxes,” she argues, “and thus, an ability to procure resources for the system to do the work it needs to do.”

Research for the common good

For Rhodes University, situated in the very town under study, Harris’s research represents more than academic inquiry. It is an example of how local knowledge can illuminate national challenges and how socially grounded research can become a tool for positive change.

“I wanted my research to make a change, a real difference,” Harris says. And while water may seem like a local issue, her findings echo far beyond Makhanda’s borders, reminding us that in every broken system there are people still trying to make it work.

Source:Communications