When are you going to get to grips with the municipalities?
The issue of the water crisis and municipalities is a complex problem.
Would you agree it stems from the fact that according to the Blue Drop audit report, 70% of municipal water treatment plants are dysfunctional?
The problem for municipalities that are water service authorities are the pipes, some of which are very old.
According to the report, almost 50% of the water they get from water boards is being lost through leaks.
This creates a problem of the debt municipalities owe to water boards because there is so much water they are not using.
How are you addressing this?
Cogta [and] the departments of water & sanitation, electricity and energy, and the National Treasury, must work together on a plan. Because the first problem is that municipalities are owed R28bn by government departments. If government departments owe such an amount to municipalities how do you expect them to fix and upgrade their water infrastructure and pay for water and electricity? And business people and ordinary citizens also owe them billions.
At the same time the municipalities owe R23bn ...
I’m going there, I’m going there. They owe water boards, they owe Eskom. It’s a vicious cycle. You need to get every relevant department on board to say, let us fix this problem. It should not be a problem of municipalities alone. It is a problem of the government, because government departments owe municipalities and they’re not paying.
Have you told them to pay up?
I have raised the matter. I have written letters to all the departments and gave them until December to pay the municipalities so that we can fix the infrastructure and deal with poor service delivery. End of December government departments must pay municipalities. Once they have done that we must talk to business people to say to them, before we disconnect you, pay what is due to the municipalities so that they can fix the infrastructure. There will be no good service delivery if we do not pay these municipalities but expect them to perform.
You think it’s unfair to blame municipalities for the water crisis?
This should not be seen as a problem between municipalities and water & sanitation. It needs a turnkey solution that we must all come together and find, a one-stop solution to this vicious cycle. The GNU [government of national unity] has been almost five months now, and we have agreed on a turnaround plan and identified challenges that need a joint approach.
Does your plan include upskilling municipalities, which according to the DWS Blue Drop report are almost entirely without the skills needed to fix and maintain water systems?
Yes, we agree with that report. Even if you give them money they won’t be able to use it because of their poor technical skills. We are auditing all the water services authorities because our attention was drawn to a water service authority in Limpopo that does not have a suitably qualified technical director.
What then, and when?
From January we’ll be deploying technical manpower and engineers to municipalities where there are shortages.
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