analysis
Graham McIntosh MP
On March 6 Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry Ronnie Kasrils accepted, with much publicity, the Water Globe Award 2002 at Linz in Austria.
Three criteria for the award are: equitable access, sustainable development and efficiency. Despite many achievements by the department, there are worrying shortcomings, as well as opportunities lost, which are camouflaged in the smoke and mirrors of Kasrils’ public relations department.
Anywhere in the world outbreaks of cholera flag a country where the government is failing in public health and hygiene, which are linked to education, sanitation and water supply.
Not until 2000, six years after the African National Congress came to power, had South Africa experienced such a serious outbreak.
In a real sense, cholera is the post-apartheid disease of non-delivery. Those who have visited the rehydration out-stations and the hospital wards set aside for cholera patients can attest to the good work the nurses and doctors do. The issue is that Kasrils and his predecessor, Kader Asmal, have failed many areas of South Africa in addressing sanitation and sustainable water supply.
The apartheid legacy can’t be blamed this time.
The Rural Services Delivery Network does an excellent job from its militant, hard-left position, in pointing out the failures of delivery by the department, even if the organisation’s solutions are obscure or unhelpful.
Its survey of the Reconstruction and Development Programme water projects built since 1994 in the Eastern Cape shows that 75% of people have no water coming out of their standpipes.
When I have visited deep rural areas in Msinga in KwaZulu-Natal, pumps at Mhlumayo don’t work; at Keat’s Drift the pump washed away and was never replaced and at the Middledrift, Hlanganani and Mphalwini Water Schemes on the northern banks of the Tugela river water is being delivered by tanker because the piped schemes supplied from the river have broken down.
The apartheid government left infrastructure in water supply worth vast sums, including community water supply and irrigation schemes such as Ncora, Thukela Estates and Zebediela, but they all lie barely utilised.
The Austrians who gave the Water Globe Award should be invited, in the interests of transparency, to do an audit of the seven million people who have been supplied with clean water to find out how many are still receiving clean water in March 2002. They might be unpleasantly surprised.
In this same area of delivery, local government is due to take over 334 water “projects” from the department over the next three years. Many do not have the resources in human, financial or capacity terms to do so and one can see another delivery failure in the offing.
The Durban Metro has refused to take over rural water projects from Umgeni Water, which isn’t making a profit.
Furthermore, in Kasril’s desperate attempt to prevent the embarrassment and legal obligations, in terms of the Public Finance Management Act, of “underspending” his R1,2-billion for water services, it will be massaged away from Minister of Finance Trevor Manuel’s eyes by being “warehoused” with bigger municipalities for eventual and undetermined later use on developments in adjoining and incapacitated municipalities.
In Gauteng a national scandal is that an estimated 52% of all the bulk water that is delivered there is wasted. It leaks away or is not paid for. In Soweto the average water loss a household (there are more than 80000) is 36000 litres a month or six times the “Basic Free Water” allowance. Acceptable international levels of maximum water loss in urban areas is 20%. Taxpayers would save literally billions if this problem of demand management were to be addressed.
The mess that the Umgeni Water Board in KwaZulu-Natal finds itself in is directly attributable to Asmal. The scent of corruption, inefficiency and debt is directly connected to ANC political decisions to have full control as well as its neo-racist policies. Those policies impoverish the water consumers of KwaZulu-Natal and the taxpayers of South Africa while enriching ANC cronies.
The restructuring of state assets or public-private partnerships is one of the greatest opportunities for releasing billions of rand to enable South Africa, as has happened in Chile, to apply funds to the socio-economic upliftment of the disadvantaged, including providing water to the rural poor.
If Kasrils is serious about helping the poor he should be moving fast to set up a small, powerful, independent and competent regulatory authority to care for the public interest and then build partnerships as fast as he can.
Unfortunately, as communists, Kasrils and the chairperson of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on the department, Buyelwa Sonjica, must resolutely turn their backs on their militant, hard-left comrades before poverty can be addressed promptly, properly and pragmatically.
As Kasrils seeks to provide “water, pure and clean” to all our people we need to come clean on all the issues and not cover up our problems.
Water is too important to be a prop in a stage production of smoke and mirrors.