State says tap water is getting worse, but citizens don’t seem to notice
SOUTH Africans are not worried about their drinking water, despite the government’s own investigations showing that the quality is deteriorating.
This is according to a report on perceptions of municipal water and sanitation services, released by the South African Local Government Association and the Water Research Commission this week. It found that 88% of South Africans believed tap water was safe to drink, up from 81% in 2011.
This flies in the face of the Department of Water and Sanitation’s 2014 Blue Drop report, which analyses the state of the country’s drinking water. It found that the quality had dropped from a score of 87.6% in 2012 to 79.6% in 2014 — and that the decline was prevalent in urban and rural municipalities.
However, Salga and the WRC found that, among the more than 2 500 people surveyed, only 2% said the Blue Drop findings affected their perception of drinking-water quality. The bulk believed it was safe to drink as long as the water looked clean, tasted and smelled good, nobody got sick after drinking it, and if others said it was safe.
Looking at the national average, the report found that 42% of people believed tap water was very safe to drink, and 46% believed it was safe — with only 11% believing it was either unsafe or very unsafe to drink.
Northern Cape residents were not as convinced as those in other provinces. There, more than four out of 10 people believed their water was very unsafe or unsafe to drink. Only 56% said they would drink water directly from the tap without boiling it first, or would buy bottled water if they could afford it. This is a far cry from the Western Cape, where only 2% felt drinking water was unsafe.
“The results confirm that consumers in smaller municipalities are less confident about the safety of their drinking water than consumers in the metropolitan municipalities,” the report said. BITTERSWEET: Stolen baby Sergio, with his mother, Juanita Muller, is in the care of his grandparents