Bishop Hiruy Tsige’s family of five are new residents to the luxury development of Ropak Real Estate homes in Legetafo Legedadi town, 11 km outskirts of Addis Abeba, Oromia Regional State. It has only been a year and a half since they bought their property.

The 69-year-old member of the clergy joined many other homebuyers when he moved into his three-bedroom home that sits on a 1,000sqm plot.

Little did he know that he was also inheriting a simmering sewage overflow problem that has plagued the occupants of the luxury homes for more than ten years.

Bishop Hiruy recounts that he noticed the problem within a few months of his move at the beginning of the rainy season. There is a manhole that sits in front of his home that is apparently attached to the main sewer line connected to other homes in the development.

“Last summer the sewage overran the manhole, and we just managed to divert the flow before it entered our house,” he recalls. “I soon started to regret buying the house.”

The family avoids any walks around the house or to open the windows because of the intolerable stench and the swarming flies that buzz over the sewage, according to him.

As a result of the problem, the tenants on the other side of his home vacated the premise, and no one is staying there which has developed into another source of insecurity for his family. There have been recurring burglaries in the development in recent months.

Ropak Real Estate was established in August 1998 by two partners - Ropak International Plc, a South African company, and an Ethiopian investor.

The real estate company leased the land from the Legetafo town administration in 2000 and delivered 23 completed homes in three years.

The company constructed three and four-bedroom homes on 500Sqm and 1,000Sqm plots.

“At this time, the real estate company has delivered 357 homes with full title deeds to the owners,” said Kebede Challa, manager of Ropak Real Estate.

The centralised design of the septic tank was built on the premises with a future plan to develop a larger septic infrastructure on an adjacent  5,000Sqm of land. That piece of property was repossessed by the town administration when the town became bigger, according to the manager. Other town dwellers living outside the development were also affected and lodged complaints about the sewer flow to the city administration.

That followed a court action that held the company responsible, and an order was issued for the company to build a waste treatment plant that allows treated effluent to be discharged into a nearby river.

The construction of the waste treatment plant started in 2007 and became operational after two years of delay due to electrical power hookup problems. Once it came online, however, the plant failed to operate properly, which the company claims was due to theft that removed the pump and accessories from the pump house.

“Even after the construction and brief operations of the water treatment plant, the problem persisted, because the waste plant could not solve the problem,” said the previous head of Legetafo’s environmental protection office.

A group from the offices of the town administration, environmental protection, the association of the residents and the court council visited the premises and requested a professional opinion.

Experts from Addis Abeba University confirmed that the waste treatment plant was not up to standards, according to the previous head of the office.

The issue is still not resolved, because the company says the association of the residents was not supportive in maintaining the waste treatment plant, and maintenance of the plant is not possible, because the area has been fenced off by people who claim the land belongs to their families.

The association of the residents is claiming that rectifying all the problems of the sewage problem, including fencing and operating the waste treatment facility properly, is the responsibility of the company.

Meanwhile, some town residents took matters into their own hands and tried to block the manholes with stones and dirt that in return caused backflows in the sewer system with the sewage overflowing in upstream manholes.

Now, the sewage is overflowing into other parts of the development, creating a foul stench witnessed by Fortunestaff during a recent site visit.

Abebe Dinku (Prof), a civil engineer and a university lecturer with over three decades of experience, points out that both the real estate company and the owners have entered into a contract with specific terms and conditions.