Sanitation is high on the agenda

NEW Water and Sanitation Minister Gugile Nkwinti has hit the ground running in his new portfolio, crisscrossing the country listening to the communities’ and stakeholders’ concerns regarding water and sanitation projects.

In his budget policy speech, he announced a raft of measures to turn around the fortunes of the water and sanitation department, which had hogged the headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Nkwinti is a doyen of politics, whose deployments have since 1994 been that of fixing and improving government service delivery operations, both in his Eastern Cape province and in the national government.

Following his recent successful visit to the Clanwilliam Dam in the Western Cape, he proceeded to Gauteng where he met the Water and Sanitation officials and the board members of the water boards on how he could improve the functioning of the department and its various water boards to save money and inculcate confidence among the civil servants.

To Nkwinti, Saturdays are just normal working days. His next stop was Giyana in Limpopo, where he again engaged community members and the district municipality officials to find the root cause of the failures of the Giyana water projects, which too, had provided scoops for the regional journalists.

Nkwinti’s strategy was to get as much information on the department’s working as possible so he could devise means and ways of instituting efficiency, cost-cutting measures and improve staff morale.

Needless to say that when the minister first arrived at the Francis Baard Street headquarters in Pretoria, he was welcomed by a group of disgruntled, striking civil servants, who were protesting against the outsourcing of the department’s infrastructure projects that were supposed to be done by the wellresourced and highly capable construction unit of the department.

Some of the department officials who had previously been suspended took advantage of the change of guard at the department and the new political developments in the country and on their own returned to their work stations. The new minister subsequently appointed them so they would work and that stability would be maintained in the department.

Nkwinti’s philosophy is that public workers are employed in terms of the Constitution to serve the people of the country so the lives of the citizens could be improved.

It is, therefore, imperative that the water and sanitation services of the country be reformed to benefit everybody, including the black farmers and the rural communities.

He believes that to achieve this ideal, the department needs creative people to drive its programmes. His planned new measures come shortly after a huge hue and cry following the drowning of small primary school children in pit latrine toilets in Mbizana in the Eastern Cape and in Limpopo provinces.

During a meeting with the department officials, the minister appealed to the senior officials to be exemplary and to be confident when they went about with their work.

He told them that they should be role models for the young aspirant civil servants. The public workers should change, for the best, their attitude towards their jobs.

They should serve all citizens irrespective of political affiliation.

He emphasised that services provided by the department should create value to the recipients, adding that there needed to be accountability for government monies used by the officials.

The much maligned water leaks programme will fall under the maintenance branch, where it will receive a budget allocation, Nkwinti announced.

In Giyana, members of the communities called on the minister to fast-track the Giyana water project, which has been in limbo for many years.

Nkwinti told the concerned Giyana residents that their water projects would be undertaken in conjunction with their municipality so that both the bulk water infrastructure and the reticulation projects could be speeded up.

That would ensure that both the sanitation and the water needs of all the Giyana villages were attended to, he said.

He said that would be in line with the government vision of the integrated development plan (IDP) where the three spheres of the government worked together to advance the welfare of the citizenry.

The people of Giyana were also told that their water projects would be one of the budget reprioritised projects so it could be implemented during the current financial year.

He said the new department structure would ensure that department officials accounted for all the expenditures they had incurred. Forensic investigations would be undertaken to find out as to what happened to the missing department monies.

Nkwinti is determined to make the water and sanitation department succeed once more.

During his budget vote he announced a Five Pillar Turn-Around strategy, which included the establishment of a National Water Resources and Services Authority, a National Water Resources and Services Regulator, a Water Resources and Services Value Chain, a Water Resources and Services Master Plan and an Institutional Rationalisation and Organisational Alignment.

To give effect to these pillars, the hard working minister has streamlined the organogram of the Water and Sanitation Department.

It will now have the Office of the Director-General which will be supported by a chief operations officer, branch planning, monitoring and evaluation, branch infrastructure build and maintenance, branch water and sanitation resources reform regulator, branch international obligations and integrated governance, branch finance management services and a corporate support services branch.

Under Nkwinti there will only be one chief financial officer (CFO) for the water and sanitation department, instead of numerous CFOs.

This is certain to ensure prudent financial management which would curtail wasteful expenditure and would ensure value for monies spent by the department.

Nkwinti’s plans of turning around the water and sanitation departments involve, among others, reprioritising and streamlining spending in accordance with the annual performance plan of the department in order to reduce unauthorised, irregular, fruitless and wasteful expenditure.

He intends to review delegation of powers and to activate and rebuild the Construction Unit to a form of state controlled construction company.

Under Nkwinti the department would approach a court of law to declare as null and void all open-ended contracts and deals.

The establishment of the catchment management agencies for the remaining seven provinces would be accelerated.

The new minister intends to speed up the transformation of the Water Trading Entity into a Water Trading Agency.

He would engage national treasury and the department of cooperative government and traditional affairs on the billions of rands of the municipals grants that are either unspent or irregularly spent at local government level.

Mtobeli Mxotwa is a director and spokesman of the Ministry of Water and Sanitation.