A crisis that dwarfs Eskom

WATER: THE ENTIRE COUNTRY COULD BE WITHOUT

The National Water and Sanitation Master Plan is sombre reading.

Eskom’s debt mountain – R419 billion, and growing – is, increasingly, a significant threat to the country’s fiscal strength. Some would argue that it is the single biggest factor influencing our sovereign credit rating.

Operationally, the unexpected wave of rolling blackouts due to load shedding has been disruptive and will drag on economic growth. But load shedding is a controlled way of dealing with a national supply-side crisis.

Despite multiple power stations, the fact that we receive power from a national grid means generation is, practically-speaking, a single point of failure.

There is a far bigger crisis looming. And, because the supply side is completely distributed to regional, district and even municipal level, it isn’t nearly as easily manageable as Eskom. And it’s going to be an effort to solve.

Water

Day Zero in Cape Town captured the headlines last year, because this affected a massive city – arguably the country’s second most-important – and the seat of Parliament.

It became a national crisis. The local and provincial governments coordinated a response, business mounted an enormous effort to reduce consumption and augment supply, and residents reduced consumption on a scale never seen before globally. The taps kept running. Rainfall was decent and the crisis was averted.

There are far bigger water crises playing out in smaller cities and districts across South Africa.

The reality

Vast stretches of the Northern, Eastern and Western Cape are still experiencing severe drought.

Beaufort West has been in crisis for months. This is not mismanagement; far lower-than-average rainfall means boreholes (a major source of the town’s water) are drying up.

A similar scenario is playing out in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown), but this is a crisis caused by the almost completely dysfunctional Makana municipality. A similar situation played out in 2013.

In Kimberley, the entire town’s water supply is shut off by the Sol Plaatje Municipality every evening from 6pm and restored at 4am the next morning.

Reservoir levels are critically low and this intervention is the only realistic way for the municipality to maintain supply (water is pumped to Kimberley from the Vaal River, about 30km away).

The recent deterioration in raw water quality poses real risks to a host of towns and cities that rely on the Vaal River system, including Kimberley.

This is an entire provincial capital, without water.

Along with this, dozens of smaller towns, including Phillipstown, Petrusville, Harrismith, Bethal, Welkom, Ladismith, Laingsburg are in crisis. Many more communities in towns and districts (in especially Limpopo and the North-West) are experiencing chronic water quality issues.

The Department of Water and Sanitation maintains it is not the department’s responsibility to deliver emergency water supplies to towns in crisis. Beaufort West and Makhanda are relying on Gift of the Givers to truck in bottled water.

Kimberley switches off water in the evenings up to 4am. This is an entire provincial capital without water.

The future

This is already a disaster. No task team will be able to fix this.