Political interference, corruption, skills shortages, supply chain inefficiencies and red tape are among the causes of the eThekwini municipality’s
water and sanitation woes that have led to a breakdown of the water treatment infrastructure.
(Delwyn Verasamy/M&G)
Political interference, corruption, skills shortages, supply chain inefficiencies and bureaucratic red tape are among the causes of the eThekwini municipality’s water and sanitation woes that have led to a breakdown of the water treatment infrastructure.
This is according to local experts, including civil engineer and former head of eThekwini water and sanitation Neil McCleod, who ran the department for 22 years, achieving favourable Blue and Green Drop reports for the high quality of the municipality’s potable and waste water until 2014.
McLeod, who now consults for five metropolitan municipalities in South Africa as well as water authorities around the world from Brazil and India to Egypt, said one of the major changes hampering the department has been the centralisation of services such as finance, fleet management and human resources, leaving its head at the mercy of city bureaucrats.
“After I left, a lot of the support functions, finance, procurement, human resources, fleet management were all centralised, but before that we were a business unit and there was just one person responsible. I was on a five-year contract and if I did not meet my targets I was out. It motivates you to perform and holds you accountable,” he said.
Under the previous system, where the department was run as a self-sufficient business unit, McLeod was solely responsible for water tariff revenue collection, creditor payments, expenditure on maintenance, vehicles and recruitment.
“The revenue collected for water stayed in water and I had to make decisions about water based on the tariff,” he said.
“We were corporatised entities, we ran on business like principles, but without a profit. Our performance was measured on customer satisfaction and on meeting targets — have you collected 98% revenue? Do your sewage works meet 95% compliance? — and that was how we judged our performance.
“We got a Green Drop [rating] every year and a blue drop and there was only one person they could blame when there were problems, and that was me. But now there are dog fights — plumbers sitting in yards because there are no vehicles, tenders don’t get advertised and meters run out,” he said. “Decentralisation was the key to our success.”
Under the centralised system it becomes tricky to hold people accountable if a plumber doesn’t have a vehicle, or there is no money to pay creditors to supply chemicals for water treatment, for example, he explained.
“On the sewage side there has been a problem with procurement and the supply chain in that things like chemicals, like chlorine, and polyelectrolytes to treat sludge have not been available because of procurement problems.”
The absence of political interference also made McCleod’s job easier.
“That was the key to our success, a mayor who said to me ‘you run the business, I look after the politics’. They set the policy for the tariffs and let the department heads deliver … there was no interference, no one came and told me to give the tender to this person and that person,” McCleod said.
As a result, the municipality became the only entity in Africa to win the Stokholm Industry Water Award, often described as the Nobel prize of water, in 2014.
McCleod said legislation should prohibit any municipal official from being an office bearer in a political party, and should introduce stiff penalties for any councillor found giving instructions to an official and the removal of any official or councillor found to be involved in processes that undermine council resolutions.
“There needs to be a cooling off period between a municipal employee becoming a councillor or a councillor becoming an employee of a municipality. The contribution of the executive mayor system to the rampant corruption in municipalities should be investigated,” he added.
McCleod noted that research by Allyson Lawless for her book, Numbers and Needs in Local Government, showed that engineering professionals are reluctant to work in municipalities because of weak management, political interference in technical matters, procurement and staff appointments, as well as rampant corruption.
“There are more than 200 municipalities that do not have any engineers on their staff and about 30 municipalities employ no engineers, engineering technologists or technicians. It would be like a hospital saying ‘we do not have any doctors or surgeons but our paramedics and nurses will cope’,” he said.
He said to address this, a detailed training programme to train 500 existing and aspirant directors of technical services had been developed more than 10 years ago, but never progressed beyond concept stage.
“The national ministry responsible for water and sanitation is in a state of crisis by its own admission, as are more than 70% of the municipalities responsible for the provision of basic infrastructure services, according to the auditor general,” McCleod noted.
“Some municipal councils reportedly have an average level of education of grade 10. These councillors are expected to exercise oversight over municipalities that have budgets ranging from hundreds of millions to tens of billions of rands. At the other end of the scale we have a need for about 30 000 skilled artisans and 30 000 competent treatment plant operators in our municipalities.”
He said a municipality should ideally focus 50% of its departmental budget on new builds and 50% on maintenance. “But the national asset management paradigm is ‘build, neglect, rebuild’. Politicians are always keen to rebuild because there is potential to do things that should not be done.”
He noted that the Northern, Southern, Central, KwaMashu and Phoenix water treatment works in Durban need to be repaired and it would take 18 months to complete the repairs.
“They are all next to rivers so they were damaged with the floods in April 2002 and June 2023. But there were problems before the floods, because they were not collecting revenue and their condition was deteriorating from 2015 onwards,” he said.
According to McCleod, the city loses 60% of the water it buys from Umgeni Water to leaks and illegal connections, and only bills for about 40.5% of it. He estimates there are about 80 000 illegal connections in the city. Of this, it collects less than 70% of revenue owed.
“So, less than 30% of the water they buy from Umgeni translates to cash in the pocket,” he said.
The state of water and sanitation infrastructure varies across the country, but generally infrastructure is failing, said independent consulting civil engineer Gisela Kaiser, who previously worked at the City of Cape Town as the executive director responsible for water, sanitation, wastewater and solid waste.
“The legislative environment is complicated, poorly understood and interpretation changes continuously. The skills in many municipalities are lacking: yet these officials have to author and compile tender documentation, evaluate and adjudicate, often award contracts to incompetent service providers, then manage implementation. The skills are simply not there,” she said.
Onerous compliance burdens service delivery and more energy is spent on auditing and consequence management than on implementation, she added.
“Despite ever more stringent procurement regulations and interpretation, corruption is thriving countrywide. Construction mafias are impacting on all infrastructure, and SA seems not to have any response. Projects become more expensive as protection money is paid, often disguised as SMME [small, medium and micro enterprises] development,” she said.
“There is a breakdown in trust between the public and private sector: public sector officials cannot be experts in everything, yet they have to draft detailed specifications to procure experts.”
Electricity outages are also affecting service delivery especially where topography necessitates much pumping, she said. “Climate change is wreaking havoc on water security, and in the case of eThekwini, flooding had a terrible impact on infrastructure. We are not resilient to shocks or stresses in most of our cities and towns.”
“Water services providers must be properly structured, and properly skilled. Water services providers must be run like a business, ensuring that tariffs are cost-reflective and revenue is well managed, with proper debt management and cash collection so that those who can afford to pay, pay,” Kaiser said.
“Lack of money is not necessarily the biggest problem, but allocating and spending it on the right projects and getting value for money must be the priority for the whole of government.”