Flows through our land
who say they won’t even eat it, but they have to make a living.”
Coming from a scientist, emotive words denote that this is a big problem. Sitting in an air-conditioned office in Hoedspruit, he writes two words on his notepad: mines and WWTW (wastewater treatment pay a R2.55-million fine for polluting Limpopo’s Ga-Selati River in 2014. That spill killed hundreds of crocodiles and fish in the Kruger section of the Olifants. In the absence of proper data, for days and nights Mohlala collected water samples that could be used against the mine.
Escaping oversight
Successes such as these are rare. Mines and other facilities know that by polluting a river slowly they can get away with it. Private consultants are hired by these operations to test the water leaving their plants. That data is given to the regional offices of the minerals department, and then sit on a table or get stuck into a file on a packed shelf in a dusty, dark room.
People who have seen this process in action say those results are rarely uploaded to any central database, and face little interrogation.
A private water consultant who plays this game says: “Most of those guys have no idea what’s in those reports, so they just sign off on whatever you give them.”
That allows mines and farms to escape oversight. In the case of municipal wastewater treatment plants, co-operative governance rules mean one department is loath to investigate another. But this is changing. Frankfort’s municipal manager was ordered in 2004 and 2008 to stop untreated water from being released from the municipal plant. Several other similar cases are under way in the Free State.
These problems arise largely because water oversight happens in silos. Because the Olifants River is spread across dozens of municipalities and three provinces, there is no single body that looks after everything that happens to the water that flows along it.
But that body should exist — the Olifants Catchment Management Agency. Along with 18 other such agencies, it has been gazetted and is the body legally empowered to manage water in the Olifants catchment area.
A management agency would mean clean water and better management of the flow of that water.
But only a handful of catchment agencies are working properly. In one, the Inkomati, there are noticeable improvements in water quality; wastewater treatment plants that used to score in the single digits in the Green Drop process now get 80%.
Naming and shaming
In 2005, the Olifants ran dry. Last year, water was held back in dams for the use of farmers as communities ran dry.
Without an agency, water users in the Olifants vicinity have to create their own forums. Many operate through WhatsApp. People call each other out for using too much water or polluting water, and rely on shame to force the offending party to clean up their act.
These informal forums use whatever leverage they have and will readily bypass the official channels if they have to. When the Olifants threatened to run dry last year, for example, community groups and municipal officials asked Kruger Park authorities to put in a formal request for water to be released from the new De Hoop Dam. Their own attempts, using official channels, had failed.
Dr Eddie Riddell, the Kruger’s manager of water resources, says “it’s a challenge” working without catchment management agencies.
Without these, the park has to deal with whatever pollution comes from Mpumalanga and Limpopo’s platinum belt. This has led to eutrophication, when excess nutrients in water (mainly from broken sewerage plants) starve plants and fish and drive the spread of algae.
In catchments such as the Vaal, there is enough extra water to flush out the system and dilute pollutants. The Olifants doesn’t have that luxury, and is faced with increasingly frequent droughts.
Riddell says: “The Olifants has reached an alternative stable state, where the most sensitive species have already been knocked out.” That means only the hardier species of plant and fish are left in the river.
“There’s a danger where we settle on this class of river and then you get a major development upriver that sets that back,” he says.
SanParks is consequently using the data it has on water pollution to oppose developments such as mines. But that fight is hard in a catchment with no unified management vision.
Climate change will make the catchment’s dire position more acute. Unless properly managed, this could collapse the catchment.