FEATURE: Residents living in the remote desert town of Sanddrift in the Richtersveld region of the Northern Cape struggle to get medication, ambulances, and jobs.
By Liezl Human
JACOB Joseph is one of about 800 people living in the remote desert town of Sanddrift in the Richtersveld region of the Northern Cape. He has lived in the region all of his life, as did his parents and his grandparents, he says.
He says he usually waits nearly two months for his chronic medication to arrive via a satellite clinic.
Sanddrift is only accessible by dirt road. It is about 55km, or nearly an hour’s drive, to the nearest clinic in Alexander Bay, and about two hours to the hospital in Port Nolloth, some 100km from Sanddrift.
The distances and bad state of the roads also mean that emergency services like ambulances do not always make it to Sanddrift. But, said Joseph, maintaining the roads should be a priority to the government.
“Health is a big problem,” he says.
But despite the many hardships, Joseph is proud of his Nama heritage and the place he calls home.
Sanddrift lies on the banks of the Northern Cape’s Orange River on the border with Namibia. But residents say their clinic is rarely operational; the ambulance rarely comes.
There is also very little work for locals.
The Richtersveld is a barren and dry landscape that gets very hot in the summer. It is expected to get even hotter because of climate change. According to SANParks, temperatures exceed 35°C over a third of the year.
Apart from its rich biodiversity, the Richtersveld is littered with diamond mines. However, these mines have very few economic benefits for the people who live in the region.
The Richtersveld Municipality said in its latest annual report that while health-care facilities are provided by the provincial Health Department, the municipality tries to support these programmes and “intervene wherever possible”. The municipality noted that “manpower at community health facilities is a source of concern as well as the lack of emergency services staff and paramedics”.
Anna Slander, who was born and raised in Sanddrift, said that she barely survives on her old age grant of R2,180. Items at the local shop are expensive and organising transport to shops in Port Nolloth — there is no public transport in Sanddrift — can cost up to R300 for a round trip.
“The children are not getting any work. And those children stay with us. We are all struggling. It used to be good. But now I ask myself: What has happened to the Richtersveld and to Sanddrift?” said Slander.
There are no recent unemployment statistics available on the Richtersveld from Stats SA. But unemployment has been rising since 2012 according to recent figures provided by the Namakwa District Municipality, which includes the Richtersveld and five other local municipalities.
Both the Namakwa District Municipality and the Richtersveld Municipality have cited downscaling and closure of some mines as the main factor in unemployment and loss of income in the region.
Resident Jacobus Farmer said that things have gotten worse over the years with all the surrounding mining. “30 years ago there was a calm community here — a gem,” he said. But now the community has lost its dignity, he said.
GroundUp tried many times to reach the Richtersveld Municipality for comment, as well as the Northern Cape Department of Health, but did not get any responses.
The Richtersveld 2022/27 IDP acknowledges some of the concerns raised by the residents. The municipality said, for instance, that the “vast distance” between the Richtersveld towns, as well as so many rural households, makes service delivery challenging. It added that health services “have major challenges”, specifically emergency services and services during non-business hours.
