Entrenched criminality, negligence and lack of maintenance are at the heart of the water crisis, experts say — and lead to such tragedies as the cholera deaths in Hammanskraal.
“I would go so far as to say that in South Africa we no longer have decisions made by government, but by entrenched criminal syndicates,” Anthony Turton, a specialist in water resource management, told the Sunday Times. “Government’s real role now is to keep these syndicates in place and to continuously feed them money.”
Turton, a founding member of the South African Business Water Chamber and a former deputy governor of the World Water Council, said control of water infrastructure had shifted to “nested syndicates”.
“There has been a forced exit of skilled workers, so they have to outsource, and these middlemen are a critical part of opening the door to corruption.
“Our national water infrastructure is broken. To just fix the issues — I am not even thinking of any upgrades — will cost us R1-trillion.”
Turton said culpable homicide charges should be brought in the Hammanskraal cholera outbreak if a link could be shown to the long-standing problems at Tshwane’s Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant.
Professor Craig Sheridan, a water research scientist at Wits University, said: “The water you are getting from Rand Water is still good. It is not rocket science to take dirty water and make it drinkable again. It is absolutely doable.”
But he said the infrastructure network of pumps and pipes that carried water from treatment plants to people’s homes had not been properly maintained.
“The second your pumps are stolen or go off, the reservoirs run dry. When that happens the pressure in the pipes goes down and then stuff can leak into them. What is happening in a lot of our infrastructure is that the inward leaking stuff can be any contaminant, and we have no control over that.”
Sheridan said the problem would only get worse.
“The raw sewage is spilling into our streets, running into our stormwater systems. It is in our rivers and can from there leak into the potable water infrastructure if we don’t have pressure in the system.
“And because of our load-shedding challenges we don’t have pressure in the system for a lot of the time,” he said.
“When you knock one part of the system over, you have a domino effect and the rest start to fall.”
He said that in the Hammanskraal case, it was no excuse to plead that the Tshwane metro was politically unstable.
“People are dying. Procurement is a very difficult thing to get right. Our procurement processes are so slow now, because we have to protect the citizenry from the tenderpreneurs, that sometimes the quotations and the proposals expire before the tenders are awarded.
“If you have an emergency pump that goes down at a wastewater treatment facility and it takes three months to be replaced, you will have raw sewage pouring into the river for three months,” Sheridan said.
It was not hard to fix the problem if there was political will.
“Wastewater treatment is by law overseen by municipal government. National can’t get involved. It is out of their domain. At provincial level the potable systems come into play. Government in this context is not just one thing, but an animal of many parts. These parts are just not talking to each other.”
Sheridan said the full extent of the cholera outbreak might not be known.
“Only one in 10 people who have cholera get really, really sick. That means for every infected person in hospital there are another nine out there with mild symptoms. The outbreak might be bigger than we think.”
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