Spend money on finding new water sources
CURRENT weather is erratic.
Deluge, followed by extreme heat, then below zero temperatures. Global warming effects perhaps? This is not about melting ice caps and increasing oceans levels that render low-laying islands extinct.
No one reads that stuff in a world dominated by social media, where anything with correct grammar and spelling beyond 140 characters is considered yawning material. It’s about investing in water management! Yawn?
Municipalities at one time or another declare their jurisdictions drinking-water disaster areas. They implore residents to save water through adverts that postulate methods on how this can be achieved.
I don’t hear investments plans to circumvent the situation – improving institutional capacity and ensuring the available resources (human or otherwise) are optimally utilised.
Drive around any municipality to see the number of leaking pipes with drinking water lost down storm water drains. This while dams are at less than 30% capacity or dry.
The employee mandated with sorting out the leaking pipes (earning a hefty salary) isn’t doing his or her job, and not only him or her, but also the entire reporting structure of the mandated business units.
Talking about improving technology in water management in this scenario is like giving a Formula 1 vehicle to a person with a learner’s licence, hoping that he or she will win a world championship.
Changing to technological gismos without improving the capacity of human resources who will be using that technology doesn’t help. Arguments to increase funding of water management business units border on the lunatic fringe when every year they can’t fully account for how they utilised their allocated budgets.
State institutions purchase technological programs, which end up gathering dust in their repositories because no employee knows how they work.
Budget allocations are in an indirect correlation with capacity, nature and function, but are directly associated with the political position the one commanding that budget holds in the hierarchy of the ruling political party. Wasteful expenditure indeed! I digress! Perhaps, with surface water running out it’s imperative to invest in initiatives for drilling for underground water to augment water supply. This in my view will provide much-needed relief to our heavy reliance on surface water run-offs in catchment facilities.
It’s also time for coastal municipalities to invest in desalination technology. We have increasing oceans levels. Why not tap into this otherwise bad phenomenon (rising oceans levels) for our benefit? The current water treatment plants of coastal municipalities can be re-purposed to include this technology.
It may take a lot of investment and time, but future benefits will be phenomenal as coastal municipalities will sell their surpluses to inland institutions.
Nceba KaWushe Matabeni, Port Elizabeth