Cape Town delays Day Zero to May

• City is considering instituting a temporary water levy as income from sales plunges due to decreased demand

The City of Cape Town has given a new date for Day Zero — the date the city will run out of water unless its residents curb their consumption even further — extending its forecast from March to May 2018.

The City of Cape Town has given a new date for Day Zero — the date the city will run out of water unless its residents curb their consumption even further — extending its forecast from March to May 2018.

The city uses about 582-million litres a day, 82-million litres more than the daily target. This is down from a collective consumption of about 700-million litres a day when the spectre of Day Zero was introduced.

Reducing demand was still the greatest factor in avoiding Day Zero, mayor Patricia de Lille said on Tuesday. “Unless we reduce demand to 500-million litres per day, there is a risk that we will reach Day Zero in May 2018.” Day Zero would be later if it rained, but “because we cannot accurately predict how much rain we will receive, we have to ensure that we reduce demand sufficiently”, she said.

The reduction in demand had caused a drop of about 40% in the income the city derives from water sales.

“It makes it that much more difficult to fund augmentation measures,” De Lille said.

“To overcome this — and as temporary measure — the city is considering a transitional [water] levy,” she said. “And it has to be temporary. People are struggling as it is.

“Anyway, it will be political suicide to raise tariffs drastically. The problem is the municipal funding model is wrong. It is the same problem as with energy. It is, after all, the national government’s constitutional obligation to provide water,” she said.

In Cape Town and Johannesburg, water tariffs have risen about 19% over the past year for demand in excess of the free first 6m³. This compares with a global average of 3.91% from July 2016 and July 2017, according to the Global Water Intelligence’s 2017 Global Water Tariff Survey.

At R5/m³, water in SA was cheap, said De Lille. “The cheapest desalinated water we could find was for R10/m³.”

The city’s augmentation plans involve mainly desalination, groundwater abstraction and wastewater treatment.

Cape Town’s strategy of reducing demand has been criticised by water experts, including Anthony Turton.

He said that it would be economically unwise to ration visitors to the city over the tourism season ahead. “The economic return on [a] unit of water is bigger than if we have the constraints of telling them to have no baths, and [not to] flush the loo.”

Enver Duminy, CEO of Cape Town Tourism, said the fact that many Capetonians were going away for holidays and that large industries would shut down for the period would “minimise the impact of visitor arrivals on our water resources”. bargaining councils surpassed the R3,500 level, on average, in 2011, he said. Sectoral determinations were not yet there, mainly affecting domestic, farm, forestry, security and taxi workers.

As inequality continued to rise in the country, it was reported that the researched sectors had decreased workplace inequality.

UNEMPLOYMENT ODDITY