Durban rivers are polluted with health threatening levels of E.coli bacteria. The faeces levels in the rivers are “hundreds of times over the recommended safety limits for drinking, washing, swimming or canoeing.

One can only wonder if there is any connection between the public toilet known as Durban and the Monday announcement by the “eThekwini” (that must be a Zulu word for “outside shithouse”) Municipality’s Water and Sanitation department to residents in several areas north of Durban that they face a “slow down” in their water supply for at least two days this week.

Don’t you just love these New South African words? Eskom has “load shedding”, and now water supplies are subject to “slow downs”. Ha. They don’t fool me.

Those words are just code for “crumbling infrastructure”

The eThekwini Municipality has been singled out as of the “most significant” polluters of some rivers because of the failure to repair burst sewer lines and poor management at some waste-water treatment plants

Potential for spreading more serious water-borne diseases – including hepatitis, typhoid and dysentery could reach epidemic levels very soon. Charming.

In the lower reaches of the Mbokodweni River, south of Durban, there were reports of children developing welts or sores on their skin from playing in the highly polluted water.

Where the Mlazi River flows into the concrete Umlaas Canal section, “geysers” of raw sewage bubbling up from the bottom of test samples that showed readings of 280 000 counts of E.coli/100ml of water.