analysis
Mike Muller and Junior Potloane
Last week’s Mail & Guardian article about the privatisation of Nelspruit’s water (“Water privatisation test case ‘a total debacle'”) appeared while we were travelling the back roads of Bushbuckridge or Botlhabela municipality as the neighbouring municipality is now known visiting water schemes.
We did not go to Nelspruit because, private or public, the vast majority of the 250 000-odd relatively fortunate residents of the former Nelspruit TLC, including its satellite townships of KaNyamazane and Matsulu, have reliable access to a basic supply of safe water as indeed most of them did before the private provider took over the operations.
Our concern was the bigger challenge, the million people who live north of the town’s boundaries, many of whom support its economy. Their situation is considerably more problematic.
The 1992 drought saw people leaving home for lack of water and many still do not have reliable supplies. There have even been reports that the majority of the RDP schemes built since 1994 have collapsed.
During our visit we found people without water in some villages that had recently been supplied; villages where the water supply was cut off because Eskom had disconnected the power; and communities where local disputes have resulted in half a settlement cut off from supplies.
We found that there is still considerable confusion about who is responsible for doing what. Some municipalities receive equitable share grants for service provision but don’t provide services. Others provide services but don’t receive funds. Water rates are collected but then used for other purposes and not paid to the service providers such as the local water board. The problems are usually not about the failure of the technical systems but about their management.
In one village in Belfast perhaps half the people do not get water on a hot day. We found, however, that most households have decided to skip the short-term RDP goal a safe water supply within 200m. They have themselves installed the medium-term goal, a tap in each yard. Unfortunately, with these convenient (but technically illegal) house connections, they consume more than the system is designed to provide. The result is that, during hot weather or in the holiday season when the village population grows, only people in the lower end of the village get water.
Our visit was arranged before President Thabo Mbeki told the National Council of Provinces that government officials should get down to the ground and find out what was really happening, but it was very much in that spirit and followed other visits during Public Service Week.
There is a limit to what you learn from head office reports and the insights you get on the ground are critical. And the visit brought broader benefits. What started as a management visit ended as a collective exercise when councillors of the Bushbuckridge local municipality decided to join us, not to tell us what we were doing wrong, but to find out what was happening in parts of their area which they would not normally visit.
We were encouraged by the fact that, in technical terms, the vast majority of the problematic systems were working. We have always known that the institutional issues are the greatest challenge.
The R400-million Inyaka dam started in 1995 will begin storing water shortly to ensure that tens of thousands of people in Thulamahashe, Dwarsloop and Acornhoek and surrounding areas will never have to go without water again as happened in 1992.
We can now build the treatment plant and distribution networks to link the dam with those towns and also to interconnect the systems which serve people from Nelspruit to nearly as far as Hoedspruit.
This will ensure that the supply is able to survive future droughts by getting away from the one-town, one-river and one-dam scenario. The dam will also allow for further expansion of irrigated agriculture, part of the reality of the government’s integrated rural development programme.
But there are many challenges, not least of all getting the new local government systems to work to achieve the common goal of providing reliable water supplies. New municipalities must arrange to keep services running in poor, sprawling informal rural settlements which is not as easy as in neatly laid out towns and townships. The new demarcation has helped but poor rural local governments still have a more difficult job to do with less resources than their urban counterparts.
This brings us back to the question of the Nelspruit dispute. The challenge in service delivery countrywide is to provide services and keep them working. Those who want to see the public sector succeed should join us in working with local government to show that it can deliver, rather than sitting on the sidelines complaining about a handful of private initiatives.
Mike Muller is director general for the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. Junior Potloane is deputy director general: water services