Mashatile’s big water plan
Farmers, AfriForum and Solidarity invited to step in and assist local municipalities
● In an urgent move to prevent a full-blown water crisis in South Africa, Deputy President Paul Mashatile intends roping in farmers and the mostly Afrikaner civic movement Solidarity to help local governments fix hundreds of stricken water-treatment plants.
The national government is warning that as a last resort it will take over provision of water responsibilities from local councils if repeated interventions and funds fail to halt the rapid decline in water quality and increasing cases of “water-shedding”.
“Essentially the president’s intention is to make sure we don’t get to a crisis as we did with electricity,” Mashatile said this week in a wide-ranging interview with the Sunday Times.
Mashatile is heading a top-level ministerial team tasked with averting an escalation of the problem. While many rural towns and villages have been left with either no water or an unreliable supply for years, the crisis has recently enveloped major urban centres, with large parts of cities such as Johannesburg left dry for weeks.
Unprecedented levels of complaints of water outages for days on end pour in from all over the country. Frustrated residents in Polokwane, Limpopo province, took to the streets this week, with one saying they suspected water provision was being destabilised to benefit tenderpreneurs who own water tankers. Water & sanitation minister Senzo Mchunu is working to address the crisis in eThekwini municipality in KwaZulu-Natal, where neighbourhoods had also been without water for weeks.
The move to reach out to farmers, the Solidarity trade union and its affiliate AfriForum, is likely to be controversial in the ANC, especially as these groups have regularly opposed ANC policies.
Mashatile said the issue needed to be “depoliticised” to allow those who can contribute to step forward.
“There are farmers that are very keen to work with us on the issue of water, because they deal with this and have got experience. So we’re going to bring them on board.
“I know that Solidarity has also said they are concerned about these issues, so my approach is that the water situation must be depoliticised. We must not make it a political weapon, so I’m going to make sure that everybody comes on board,” he said.
Mashatile dismissed any notion that the announcement of the task team and the plans to tackle the crisis were an election gimmick, saying: “This is an intervention well beyond the elections, because, other than households being able to cook and wash and drink water, you have industry that needs water. Food security itself relies on water.”
The extent of the looming crisis has been underlined by the latest Blue Drop report from the department of water & sanitation. It found that water from 46% of the country’s systems is not safe to drink and that 47% of the water in all municipalities was non-revenue water — meaning it was being lost to leakages in pipelines, illegal connections, or ineffective revenue collection.
The report also revealed that 64% of the country’s sewage and waste water treatment works were at high or critical risk of discharging partially or untreated water into rivers and the environment.
Unsafe drinking water cost the lives of 47 people last year in a cholera outbreak that affected Hammanskraal in Gauteng, and the Free State and Mpumalanga.
Mashatile said the crisis had reached the point where the national government would step in where necessary.
“I know some local councillors won’t like that because they say we’re taking their powers. We’re not going to take their powers, but we will intervene where we realise that [despite] the support we are giving, and the grants, there is no progress. It is true that the provision of water in the constitution is the responsibility of municipalities, but the constitution does not bar national government from intervening.
“You don’t wait and say we will give capacity to the municipality, we’re going to give them grants, and nothing happens. The priority of national government should be the people, so if you think the help you’re giving councillors is not bearing fruit, then you go directly as national government.”
Mashatile added that intervention, which would only happen as a last resort, would have to be carefully managed so as not to affect municipalities’ ability to generate revenue from water provision. “The supply of water and electricity is a critical revenue base, so we won’t take it away.”
Bennie van Zyl, the general manager for Transvaalse Landbou-Unie, one of several organisations representing the interests of commercial farmers, was sceptical about Mashatile’s initiative.
“It’s quite funny that for many years there was no contribution to the maintenance and development of new infrastructure for water reticulation in our country, and now all the old systems are falling apart. Now he’s realised it’s election year and water is a big problem,” Van Zyl said.
He said water remains a big issue for the country, both in rural and urban areas, and
that he had personally raised the looming crisis as far back as 2009 in a meeting with former president Jacob Zuma at the start of his first term in office.
“We are seeing the price of cadre deployment ... The government took skilled people and replaced them with people that they liked or their friends. And these people did not know how to manage these things, and maintenance was not on the table. To change that around now will take a lot of money because you now have to replace systems, not repair them.” “I think it’s playing politics,” he added. Despite his doubts, Van Zyl said they would welcome an opportunity to come on board with the government, particularly on issues related to water management, but the farming community did not single-handedly have all the answers. “We have to apply the right principles, and do it with skilled people who can do the job ... We have a lot of challenges, but we still stay very positive because we have to overcome this,” he said.
Lambert De Klerk, AfriForum’s manager for environmental affairs, speaking on behalf of Solidarity, said they and Solidarity would welcome the opportunity to be able to assist. “We have been conducting water tests at water treatment plants since 2013, and we have seen a gradual deterioration of infrastructure at a municipal level,” he said.
De Klerk added that AfriForum was preparing to host a water conference in June, where experts, including former civil servants in the department of water & sanitation, would grapple with the issues.
“We have a database of over 1,000 engineers and specialists all over the country that are willing to help, but there has been no buy-in from municipalities ... We are not sure why there was a need to create a task team because we believe that if the departments of water & sanitation, and Cogta held municipalities accountable, there would be a change in attitude.”
De Klerk said critical areas for the government to address were water losses, which cost billions of rands annually, the pollution of water sources mainly by treatment works, and accountability for municipalities who do not pay water boards for the water they receive.
“The auditor-general’s 2022 reports showed that water boards are owed more than R14bn by municipalities, and this is the number one reason for them being on the brink of closure.”