Day Zero spreads countrywide as water infrastructure disintegrates

The department of water & sanitation disseminates a figure that indicates the state of the nation’s water: as of June 2016, 89.4% of South Africans had access to piped water. But is this a good number, or a bad one?

The answer for most people depends on which side of the number they fall, though the question is becoming irrelevant as supplies fail countrywide.

Former minister of water & sanitation Nomvula Mokonyane, now communications minister, quotes the statistic in her last foreword for the department’s annual report, in which she writes that “immense effort” has been made by the department over the period under review to accelerate the delivery of water and sanitation services. But she immediately blames the drought for the department’s financial difficulties and the resultant parlous state of water and sanitation infrastructure.

The veracity of her view is under investigation by the parliamentary standing committee on public accounts, which is considering criminal charges over a R2.9bn overdraft the department took with the Reserve Bank, among other apparent irregularities.

The state of SA’s water and sanitation infrastructure has now been proven beyond doubt. Cape Town received most of the attention over the inadequacy of its bulk-water infrastructure as the city battled to stave off a drought-induced Day Zero (when the municipality would have shut down the piped water supply), but elsewhere Day Zero has arrived in a variety of forms.

Earlier this week, there was an intermittent Day Zero in the Eastern Cape, where the towns of Hankey and Patensie in the Kouga district have instituted severe rationing, limiting water supply to a few hours a day.

The district’s only bulkwater supply is Kouga Dam, which is at about 7% of its capacity. This will last less than 10 weeks, the Kouga local municipality says.

The locals call it water shedding. Residents have already been limited to 50la day, as have Capetonians.

For perspective, consider that it is internationally held that a person needs 75l a day to lead a heathy life, according to a report by water expert Asit Biswas first published in Singapore’s Business Times. In that city, which pioneered modern urban water use, consumption is about 150l per person per day.

In the US it ranges from 300l to 380l. In SA it is 235l, Biswas writes.

In KwaZulu-Natal’s Ugu district, municipal infrastructure collapse caused a public-health Day Zero. There, Business Day reported nine months ago, it is not thirst that kills people when the taps run dry, but sepsis.

Ground zero is Murchison Hospital where medical personnel have had to manage patients without the benefit of handwashing. Faecal-oral transmission of infection is the most common, medical personnel say.

The consequences of Murchison’s dirty hospital have not been quantified, and may never be, but medical sources say that in a vast area with more than 2 million people where water supplies have been intermittent for more than two years, the public health and socioeconomic effects can only be severe.

And so the list grows to include small towns across the country such as Sannieshof, North West, where an intervention by residents to supply water drew the ire of the municipality. Sannieshof’s Day Zero has continued, its causes ranging from bulk-water system failure to sewage polluting groundwater.

The common factor in water crises across the country is failing infrastructure, mainly municipal infrastructure.

The department of co-operative governance & traditional affairs has identified 87 municipalities as “distressed or dysfunctional, requiring urgent intervention”.

The department of water & sanitation notified 30 of these municipalities in 2017 that it would cut their water supplies unless they made urgent arrangements to repay their arrear water bills. At the time, municipalities owed R10.7bn for water.

Some of the municipalities have arranged to begin repayments amounting to about R300m, but the problem largely continues. A lead offender is the Emfuleni local municipality south of Johannesburg. Rand Water cut its water pressure by 60% in November 2017, which meant that Day Zero had arrived for residents in high-lying areas, including a school and a hospital, whether they paid their bills or not.

Emfuleni still cannot pay its water bill, now at about R384m. A spokesman said last week that it had no money to maintain infrastructure and that this was the cause of enormous sewage spills into the Vaal River.

For residents along the Vaal and in towns and cities countrywide, the value of SA’s piped water statistic will mean little if the supplied volume is inadequate, unsafe or intermittent. As water expert Anthony Turton has warned repeatedly over the past 10 years, the consequences of failing infrastructure will be catastrophic.

Day Zero will have arrived for everyone.