Water supplies might flush out rural school toilet problems

THERE are positive moves in the Department of Water and Sanitation which might relegate the dangerous rural school toilets to the history dustbin.

The new water and sanitation minister has already conceptualised strategies and put plans in place to improve the service delivery of the department.

Her plans include improving the financial management of the department to ensure the resources are used for their intended purposes, and teaming up with relevant departments to guarantee unity of purpose in the government service delivery.

Minister Lindiwe Sisulu told a packed media briefing that she was gunning this year for a clean audit. This department goal includes appointing the correct people to man the department’s strategic positions. Those who step on the wrong side of the clean governance would be subjected to consequence management, she said.

She added that a stabilising committee had been appointed to help restructure the department so it could achieve its goals of clean administration.

Several components and entities that belong to the department were being investigated for fraud, corruption and maladministration, and so far more than 100 officials had either been dismissed, suspended without pay or had resigned, Sisulu said.

Recently, the Department of Water and Sanitation signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Basic Education (DBE) where the Water Affairs Department would provide water to more than 3 000 schools across the country.

The DBE would foot the water bill. Some R600 million has already been set aside for this service to needy community schools.

These are the benefits communities stand to gain when two seasoned ministers pull together to overcome social disparities.

The provision of adequate water to the schools will overhaul the unhygienic sanitation system in rural schools, where there had been instances of small children dying in primitive pit latrines. It will also assist in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic because learners will be able to regularly wash their hands.

According to the Water Research Commission, the Department of Water and Sanitation intends to use modern technology to roll out safe sanitation to all schools.

The new measures that Sisulu is introducing will resonate with her earlier interventions in the droughtstricken areas of the country. She has supplied Butterworth in the Eastern Cape, QwaQwa in the Free State and Moutse Municipality in Limpopo with water tanks and tanker trucks to regularly fill community tanks with clean water.

The Giyani water project, which has been in the news for years for all the wrong reasons, might finally be finished in September – thanks to Sisulu’s intervention.

Sisulu is the minister of the merged Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation departments. Although she has been resolute in her endeavours to clean up corruption and maladministration, she has also displayed a caring heart.

Recently she moved families from the squalor of shanty areas in Johannesburg and Mamelodi near Pretoria and provided them with special houses built using alternative technology to afford them social distancing during the pandemic.

Mxotwa is a director of Human Settlements, Water and Sanitation Department.