“Sometimes it is 6 or 7 in the morning to 9 to 10 at night, six or seven days a week. There’s a lot of responsibility that comes with it. The toughest part is on a personal level, the level of responsibility you feel.”
Dr Sean Phillips is the director-general of the department of water & sanitation. Or “water and sh*t”, as he puts it with an impish grin over our dawn meal at the Mugg & Bean in Woodmead, Johannesburg.
It is too early for me to even contemplate breakfast but he tucks into scrambled eggs and we caffeinate hard before he hits the road to Pretoria. Lunch was not an option on his timetable, and we had to reschedule once after his minister, Senzo Mchunu, called him for an urgent “dawn meeting”.
He has been doing this job for only three months, but I am convinced that if anyone can sort out the problems facing SA’s water and sanitation systems, it may be this good doctor.
You would be hard-pressed to find a more focused or passionate developmentally and civically minded civil servant than Phillips, an engineer by training. He is nothing if not single-minded, as I discover in a week where water and sanitation have hit the headlines for bad reasons.
“The water is fine here [in Joburg] and in Cape Town, but there have been particular problems in [Gqeberha] and some other areas in the country where there is E coli from sewage plants that is leaking into the sewerage system.
"But it is generally more a problem in smaller towns because the smaller towns and rural areas are not coping with their water management systems or their waste water systems,” he says.
“In PE and East London specifically there is a very strange weather phenomenon, which means that in almost all other parts of the country the dams are overflowing but the dams around PE are almost empty, and that has resulted in their reservoirs getting so low. It is the water equivalent of load-shedding — they are basically doing water-shedding.”
But it is the Cape Town scenario that could easily unfold on horrifying repeat all over the country.
I wonder aloud if this is not the sort of thing that set off the Roman Empire’s collapse — troubles with the water supply? “There are many people in smaller areas and rural areas where they are not OK. Often they don’t have water and the water they do have is polluted.
"The one city that does have a problem with drinking water is Pretoria. Parts of it, like Hammanskraal, are in real trouble because of the waste water treatment issues there.”
In many areas the waste water treatment works are overloaded and spill either raw sewage or half treated sewage into the environment, which gets into the water sources
— Dr Sean Phillips, director-general of the department of water & sanitation
The problems with waste water treatment across the country are multiple.
“First, the RDP housing programme meant that a lot of the houses have been built with connection to the sewage works and the waste water works, but without proper planning around capacity.
"Building RDP housing is a provincial function and the waste water works is municipal.
"There was so much pressure to deliver housing that they didn’t wait until the waste water treatment works were upgraded.
"So in many areas the waste water treatment works are overloaded and they can’t deal with the load and they spill either raw sewage or half treated sewage into the environment, which gets into the water sources or leaks into the water distribution system,” Phillips explains.
“The second problem is that many municipalities have failed to prioritise maintenance work. You can put it down to various factors — like the youth of our democracy and politicians at municipal level not seeing the value of maintenance of the water works because there is no ribbon-cutting at a sewage treatment facility. You get much more kudos for building a community centre or a soccer field.
“Also, water and sanitation are meant to be self-sustaining businesses, like electricity. You are not meant to have constant government subsidies for water sanitation and electricity. None of the municipalities I am aware of ring-fence the revenue from water and sanitation. It goes into the general kitty and council decides what to do with it — including soccer fields.
“The third is very weak billing and revenue collection systems. You can say, ‘Why don’t they just fix it, what is wrong with the management of the municipalities?’ Well, there is huge staff turnover, then each time new leadership comes in they start a new improvement programme — nothing gets improved. Corruption is still huge and [there are] inappropriate appointments at senior management level. So the problem is that at municipal level the situation is still deteriorating.”
Marvellous. So given this (insert scatological word here) show, how does he carry on?
“I keep the bigger picture in mind. I think that whatever point in history you live in you have particular challenges to deal with and in South Africa we have the tricky situation where you have parallel realities. There was a woman in Limpopo last month who went to collect water at a river and was eaten by a crocodile.
“You have people living in those conditions and people living in First World conditions. I take a bigger-picture view. There has never been anyone who doesn’t live with challenges one way or another.
"The key thing is how you cope and deal with the challenges. It is about working with people and having compassion. Sometimes it gets to you when you get daily letters from very angry citizens — some are very hostile — ‘Why are you so crap at doing your job properly?’ — people are understandably very sensitive around water. And then you have the guilt and horror over the woman in Limpopo to contend with.”
So I have to ask the most pressing questions, given the climate and the infrastructure. Is there going to be water? in the future? And will be able to drink that water? What should we be doing — putting up storage tanks and running our own water distillation and desalination plants?
“The situation is not irretrievable, it can be turned around — but there are certain preconditions. In the last five years we have had five ministers and seven or eight directors-general.
"A prerequisite is stability in leadership that is committed to turning the situation around and that is not corrupt. And we need a strong intervention at municipal level — which is what Senzo Mchunu wants to do ... there are a number of big projects that have been delayed, like the Lesotho Highlands Phase 2, which are key to enduring water stability.”
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