Water: 67 metros face legal action
Civil engineers and other experts say it is not too late to save South Africa’s waterways from high levels of pollution
The department of water and sanitation (DWS) has filed 67 criminal court cases against municipalities across the country when they ignored its directives regarding pollution and non-compliance with national legislation.
This emerged after the Bethal magistrate’s court recently fined the Govan Mbeki local municipality R200 million for violating the National Environmental Act and the National Water Act.
But water experts have warned that although the criminal cases show the department is flexing its muscle, a major physical audit of the country’s water infrastructure is necessary and citizens, particularly professionals in water and engineering, need to work together to tackle the water crisis with municipalities.
Anet Muir, the chief director of water use compliance, monitoring and enforcement, said this week the department has criminal cases against municipalities mostly in Mpumalanga (22), Gauteng (13), North West (10) and Limpopo (8).
Among the municipalities facing legal action are Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni and Tshwane metro municipalities, as well as Mopani, Fezile Dabi, Sekhukhune and Chris Hani district municipalities.
Muir said municipalities had either not taken action after being issued with compliance notices for their alleged non-compliance with the Water Act, or for incidents of pollution. A total of 74 cases are under way.
“If they are non-compliant we write to them and say … we believe that you are transgressing the following provisions. Provide us with written representation disputing this or provide mitigation or what your action plan is to address it,” Muir said.
“If they don’t agree with the representation, a directive is issued, which then says you must do XYZ by a certain time to address your non-compliance. Failing that we then move to criminal enforcement,” she said.
Muir said for a municipality to ignore a directive to comply with the Water Act is a criminal offence.
She added that some municipal officials were not even aware of the criminal cases, as became apparent at a workshop for Upper Vaal municipalities on 12 April.
“Some of the municipalities that were present came to me afterwards and said, ‘can you please send me the details? I didn’t know there was a criminal case against us’,” Muir said.
Despite the water crisis experts believe it is not too late to fix broken infrastructure and save the country’s waterways.
University of Cape Town (UCT) civil engineering lecturer Gundo Maswime said in many instances the department took legal action to “exonerate itself as having fulfilled their role because the legal arrangements limit the powers of the department” to ensure security of supply to households at municipal level.
Regarding municipalities, he said: “In our interactions with officials, we find them to be helpless and desperate. In many instances, there are very right-standing municipal engineers and technologists who are doing their best to remedy an intractable situation, which they have no tools to fully comprehend and no human capital to solve the challenges.”
In addition, the country does not have important information about the status of its water infrastructure.
“From what we see and experience, we have many water pipes due for replacement and in many instances, we have no detailed records about where they are, how big they are and what they are made of,” Maswime said. “Maintenance teams do not even know what to stock up on for replacement pipes and joints. In some instances, they cannot find a valve to close off water for emergency maintenance.
“The matter of water infrastructure challenges is now firmly on the agenda of the country because the disruptions are now in the big cities. Rural areas like Mutale have not had a six-month continuous water supply in the last 20 years and the citizens have accepted this as a norm.”
Some of the issues Maswime highlighted include:
•Asbestos pipes carry water in Nelson Mandela Bay metro and in many other areas.
•Pipes being too old to handle the operational pressure, as was the case in Hout Bay, according to the City of Cape Town.
•Johannesburg Water is estimated to be losing more than 44% of its bulk water supply according to the department’s Blue Drop Report.
•Rural municipalities such as Vhembe have no way of tracing where the losses are.
•In some traditional authority areas people have been allowed to build expensive houses over bulk municipal water lines.
•The reconstitution of provincial and municipal boundaries and water governance changes in 1999 resulted in the loss of important records.
Maswime said that to arrest the water crisis the first step is to identify and catalogue all water infrastructure and its current state.
The second was to prioritise problems and review “governance arrangements” to ensure there were people who can solve the problems.
He said a “drastic intervention” such as forming teams of welltrained plumbers was required to retrace the full reticulation network using the best technologies available.
“Durban metro has more engineers than Eastern Cape and Free State municipalities combined. There is no single registered professional engineer in the 17 municipalities in the Eastern Seaboard across four districts of Ugu, Alfred Nzo, OR Tambo and Harry Gwala,” he said. “In Limpopo, DWS completed the construction of Nandoni Dam more than 15 years ago, but there is no capacity in the water authorities to manage construction of reticulation networks.
“While around 80% of wastewater treatment plants [nationally according to the 2022 Green Drop Report] are not treating sewage to the right quality, what makes us think municipalities that are failing to maintain water infrastructure are able to treat water to the right quality? It is not too late if we start,” he said.
“Fundamentally, we were wrong to have politicians presiding over engineers in the way our legal framework designed it, particularly on issues of maintenance which should never have been subjected to the haphazardness and arbitrarily nature of politics.”
Wits University development specialist Mike Muller agreed that it is not too late to resolve the crisis but said it is important for citizens to support staff who are trying to do a good job under difficult conditions.
“They should work with them to find out what is needed to improve the situation. If politicians are failing to prove adequate support or actively interfering in the management of the services, citizens need to raise their voices to help,” he said.
“Water is a renewable resource and polluted rivers can recover once pollution is brought under control. But because the country has limited technical and financial resources, interventions need to be prioritised,” he said.
Kevin Winter, of the UCT Future Water Institute, said cities need to take a stronger lead in public water services.
“The warning signs of urban water failures are being sent far and wide across South Africa. Water-shedding is not an option and prolonged periods of getting no water from a tap are unacceptable,” he said.
“During Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ drought scenario, the citizens realised that this city without water would be catastrophic. The City of Cape Town learnt how incredibly close to chaos [it was] and chose to do several things post-drought.”
Winter said this included investing in diverse water sources to meet a shortfall of about 300 million litres by 2030. Interventions included groundwater abstraction, water reuse and desalination.
“The water reuse programme, still under discussion and planning, will be the largest investment in South Africa in advanced treated technologies and will add between 70 to 100 megalitres of water to Cape Town’s potable (drinking) water.”
He said cities must plan for population growth with limited financial and political support from the national government.
“What we are seeing are multimunicipalities left with onerous responsibilities for maintaining and improving water and sewage reticulation and treatment systems without adequate resources and expertise to manage these complex technologies. Planning is not possible under a crisis management regime.”
Winter said that by 2030 South Africa will have a water supply shortfall of at least 17%, which could be addressed by adding infrastructure, at great cost, or by reducing wastage.
We were wrong to have politicians presiding over engineers … particularly in maintenance