Shock statistics on water losses

● Figures show Bay lost almost half of supply in July

The Nelson Mandela Bay municipality will never completely gain control over its massive water loss problem because of water that goes unbilled by the city and other accounts that are simply estimated.

This was the shocking admission from infrastructure and engineering boss Walter Shaidi at a budget and treasury portfolio committee meeting on Monday.

A report presented to the committee revealed that the municipality lost nearly half of its water supply in July, with figures showing water losses for the month at 48.6%.

Average water losses for the 2017/2018 financial year were at 43.9%, a significant increase from the 35.5% water losses in the 2016/2017 financial year.

This comes as overdue consumer debt, which the municipality blames largely on the punitive water restriction tariffs, increased by R14.2m.

This brings the city’s total debt from non-paying account holders to R3.27bn as at July.

To add to the city’s woes, average electricity losses for July were 16.28%, also up from the last financial year’s 13.9%.

Electricity and energy senior director Peter Nielson said current strategies were not yielding the desired outcomes.

Shaidi, however, said billing continued to fluctuate but was not going beyond 70% of what customers actually owed.

“Is our billing right? No. Billing keeps going up and down, for the last two years the highest billing we have done is 70%, now we are billing at 50% or 51%, what do you expect?

“Even if we kill ourselves fixing all the leaks, our non-revenue water is still high because billing is not yet billing all the volumes [of water].

“Billing is the main reason why the non-revenue water losses are so high. It goes up and down,” Shaidi said.

He said the billing department admitted that, because of estimates, billing was an issue.

“Non-revenue water will never stabilise until billing stabilises,” Shaidi said.

“I accept that infrastructure and engineering can still do more. Our estimate at the moment is that water losses are about 27-29% and, of this, 1015% was from schools. ”

Shaidi said officials had installed restrictors at schools to curb the losses.

He said the situation was further exacerbated by the city’s ageing infrastructure.

Officials hoped to address this with the loan funding they were expecting to get.

Shaidi was responding to questions from councillors on why losses had increased.

DA councillor Retief Odendaal said both electricity and water losses were a concern.

“We need to get an explanation as to why the water losses are so exceptionally high. This clearly indicates we are again going in the wrong direction.

“Is it a billing issue that we have to address within budget and treasury, or is this real losses?” Odendaal said.

ANC councillor Rory Riordan said while he understood that a report from one month was not sufficient to analyse a trend, he was concerned.

Riordan asked that statistics on which households were responsible be made available.

“If these are wealthy households we need to know and if these are poor households then it’s a different story.

“On water losses, we are operating in the absence of an explanation. One moment we appear to be doing well and then the next we suddenly go back.

“We need some explanation on this,” Riordan said.