By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Deputy President Paul Mashatile said implementing resolutions from the Water Indaba was urgent to address the water crisis around the country.
Mashatile made the comments while closing the National Water and Sanitation Indaba held at the Gallagher Convention Centre in Midrand on Friday.
The two-day meeting focused on putting together a plan to improve the country’s water and sanitation systems.
To tackle the water crisis, the Indaba proposed several key actions:
- Infrastructure development: Improve planning, procurement and project management to attract more financing.
- Diversifying water resources: Use groundwater, seawater and desalination and treat wastewater more sustainably.
- Water conservation: Implement better water conservation strategies and reduce physical losses in municipal systems.
- Financial reforms: Reorganise funding to focus on improving basic service access and support municipalities in managing their water infrastructure.
- Addressing non-revenue water: Municipalities must prioritise budgets for maintenance, close illegal connections, replace old pipes and strengthen water system management.
- Managing municipal debt: The National Treasury has agreed to withhold equitable share allocations from non-paying municipalities and has approved a write-off mechanism for historic debts, conditional on municipalities paying current accounts in full.
Mashatile pointed to the Blue Drop Report, which shows the quality of drinking water is getting worse across the country.
“The audit report revealed that the quality of the country’s drinking water is deteriorating. One of the biggest difficulties in accessing quality drinkable water is inadequate infrastructure for water reticulation and sanitation,” said Mashatile.
He said the country must urgently fix old infrastructure and invest more money in building and maintaining water systems.
“To date, the water infrastructure fund has secured R23-billion for seven large water infrastructure projects,” he said.
Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina said the country’s water system has not kept up with growing demand.
“Over the years there has been an exponential growth in informal settlements in cities resulting in high unplanned demands and illegal water connections,” she said.
“There is also poor financial management, poor revenue management, escalating debt in the water sector, poor billing system, illegal connection, over consumption and high non-revenue water, infrastructure decay and governance instability.
She stressed that municipalities had access to various grants – including the Municipal Infrastructure Grant, Water Services Infrastructure Grant, Urban Settlements Development Grant and the regional Bulk Infrastructure Grant – but municipalities were not using them.
“Unless we agree that we don’t have the technically skilled people in your employment, municipalities,” she said, to a round of applause.
Meanwhile the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) has on Friday opened a second sluice gate at the Vaal Dam to manage increasing water levels due to the continuous rainfall.
This follows the opening of the first sluice gate last weekend.
The opening of another sluice gate on Friday increased the outflow to approximately 240 cubic metres per second (mᵌ/s).
The department said that all six valves that were opened on Monday, have been closed.
“The dam is currently sitting at 106.52% and the increased outflows seek to keep the dam at 105%. The current water release by the two sluice gates is still within the safe operational limits and is not expected to lead to overtopping of riverbanks downstream.
“At Bloemhof Dam, levels are currently at 96.10% and the outflow of 400 mᵌ/s will remain unchanged to allow for the extra flows that are expected from Vaal Dam, and to keep water levels at the dam below 100.0%,” the department said.