Ekurhuleni Metropolitan Municipality, the local authority and government for Gauteng, has been experiencing a water crisis recently, and residents are not at all happy about it. While the region has been experiencing heatwave after heatwave recently, it is contended that the crisis could have been avoided had the municipality not underspent on waste water management and water services.
The metro recently experienced severe water outages lasting around nine days at a time in some cases, and the Opposition party is accusing it of underspending on vital management, citing that according to reports it had only spent between 48% and 66.3% of its R127m budget for waste water management and had failed to spend almost 46% of the R333m allocated to water services.
South Africa as a whole is suffering from drought, dire water shortages and interrupted water services currently, and if this is the reason why then the government needs to be held accountable. Farmers are losing millions of rand, some have even lost their farms due to water shortages, and this had had and will still have a knock-on effect on prices of produce countrywide.
According to reports, Rand Water presented a plan to Parliament’s portfolio committee on water and sanitation in February, and had the metro paid any heed to it the crisis could have been avoided. The plan included the implementation of independent power sources at pump stations, by Rand Water, due to electricity outages, so that the pumping of water to reservoirs was not affected as happened last year when the reservoirs ran dry due to one of the nine-day water outages last year.
Rand Water’s plan also included a plan to fix the water network which currently loses around 40% of the water due to leaks. The question must be asked why the Ekurhuleni Metro underspent on its budget, and why it did not give Rand Water the go-ahead to implement the plans that would have averted the water crisis in which it finds itself currently.
While consumers are being asked to use water sparingly, it will seriously not really make a marked difference if those in charge of the water do not spend available finances to do the required maintenance and we continue to basically allow 40% of our water to just run down the drain. It is time that those in charge showed a willingness to do the job that they are paid to do and look after our water so that we do not all have to suffer needlessly.
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