Urgent action needed to fix water and sewerage infrastructure

Herman Mashaba has called upon all South Africans to join ActionSA and to “Fix SA”.

This call to action is no more urgent than when it comes to fixing’ s and infrastructure. maintaining our country

The ANC is notoriously bad at maintaining infrastructure and this is borne out by the state of our roads, which are pockmarked with potholes. The overhead electrical infrastructure is archaic and is also badly neglected, resulting in unnecessary and unscheduled electrical outages.

However, the neglect of crucial unseen infrastructure such as underground water and sewerage systems is almost (if possible) even more serious because it goes largely undetected and unseen until it’s too late and we run out of water and we end up polluting our environment and have to deal with the resultant social, epidemiological and economic consequences.

Water is a very scarce resource in SA and this is compounded by the fact that the ANC-led government has not deemed it necessary to construct any new major dams since coming to power in 1994, despite our population growing considerably.

While we have been experiencing a very dry climatic cycle for a number of years, the greatest threat to our water security is wastage from leaking bulk water infrastructure, leaking domestic infrastructure such as overflowing toilet cisterns, irresponsible water usage by especially those who do not pay for water, and water theft.

The neglect of sewerage infrastructure is an area of growing concern because not only does this hold grave environmental challenges for us, it also holds potentially catastrophic epidemiological consequences as we experienced in KwaZulu-Natal after the recent floods.

What is of great concern for ActionSA in the Eastern Cape is that most of the cities and towns are ANC-governed and until recently so too were both of our metros.

Buffalo City Metro is a microcosm of the notoriously inept, ineffective, and negligent management of wastewater in the province, and what we have seen at the wastewater treatment works on the banks of the Bridledrift Dam is the discharge of raw effluent directly into a dam that also serves as a major source of potable water for the city.

There is no formal oversight of operations or the proper performance of these facilities.

The sewerage infrastructure in townships, especially related to RDP developments, is bad as contractors more often than not use inferior quality plumbing materials that quickly fall into disrepair.

What makes this situation all the more unacceptable is that it affects poor communities more than affluent communities as they often don’t have the means to object and have to resort to protest action that often further compromises services infrastructure. There are also the potentially catastrophic economic consequences that arise from the pollution of our rivers and dams which are related to the contamination of primary agricultural products as a result of irrigating pastures and crops with water polluted by sewerage and the concomitant increased levels of E. coli.

Not only does this compromise the food quality and safety of food produced for the SA consumer market, it seriously compromises our primary product export industry which is crucial to our economic wellbeing and critically important for job creation in the depressed rural areas.

The health standards applicable to export products as prescribed by “Global Gap” are very exacting and any traces of unacceptable chemical residues and certainly of E.coli will lead to the exclusion or prohibition of the export of any products which exceed the limitations.

It is this kind of careless neglect by the current ANC governments at the national, provincial and local levels along with the responsible departments that are placing countless people’s lives and livelihoods at risk and the situation needs to be addressed urgently before the consequences of this neglect are fully manifested in our country.

ActionSA, therefore, urges all citizens to take note of the parlous state of our water and sewerage infrastructure and to replace the current administration with a competent government that will prioritise oversight and accountability at all levels of government responsible for our critical service delivery infrastructure.

There are also the potentially catastrophic economic consequences that arise from the pollution of our rivers