Democratic Alliance MP Graham McIntosh begins his review of the water situation (”Beneath the surface of water affairs”, March 22 to 27) with a factual error. Contrary to his assertions, I did not go to Austria to receive any award. The Globe award for sustainable water supply was presented to the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry and received by an official, whose trip to Vienna was paid for by the organisers of the conference.
McIntosh advances to Keate’s Drift on the Mooi river in KwaZulu-Natal in similar vein and implies that my department’s water scheme there has failed. But this is a defunct old homeland scheme, where two years ago Tony Leon was triumphantly wheeled out to turn on a dry tap ? real smoke-and-mirrors stuff that conveniently ignored the successful Ethembeni scheme just 1km up the road that serves 5Â 000 people in the area. He continues on to Durban and reports that Ethekweni has refused to take over Umgeni Water’s rural water schemes, which is simply not true.
He allies the whinging right of the DA with the whining so-called left of the Rural Development Support Network and highlights a handful of projects, which my department identified as problems, as evidence that our programme has failed.
There is really no point in replying in detail to this kind of ”critique”. It is far more important to address the real challenges that McIntosh has failed to grasp. Providing basic water and sanitation, and improving the quality of life, the health and the dignity of our people is a complex business, which is being addressed in a programmatic manner.
I am the first to acknowledge that providing water supply and sanitation infrastructure ? which we have done for more than seven million people ? is only a first step in ensuring that our people enjoy its potential benefits. To achieve those benefits, the users should know what is expected of them, their rights and obligations. And we have to ensure that local government is effective both in its operations of water supply and sanitation, and in its engagement with its citizens.
The cholera epidemic, which continues to erupt in poor communities ? who do not share water or water service providers, but share poverty ? demonstrates the need to address the matter with the greatest seriousness.
During this past Water Week I focused on these issues. The Wash campaign has highlighted the importance of individual hygiene if the benefits of water and sanitation are to be translated into better health for our families. And we have emphasised that the right to basic water and sanitation comes with obligations to support the service providers ? by, for instance, paying for what we consume over and above the basic free allowance and taking care of our public infrastructure.
One way in which my department supports local government is to hand over to them water-service infrastructure and responsibility for its operations. Constitutional injunctions aside, we believe that local municipalities will be more responsive to water users than a distant government department.
We also support local governments’ role by appointing them as implementing agents for capital projects. In this context we transfer money to municipalities. This is hardly a magic trick. In line with Treasury regulations, these transfers include funds for work to be done on specified projects before the June 30 end of local government’s financial year. My director general explained the process in detail to the portfolio committee earlier this year. This is hardly ”warehousing” money for undetermined projects to conceal under-expenditure as McIntosh claims.
In fact, rather than underspend, we have overspent our capital budget by R20-million on this vital programme, despite the difficulties faced in this first year of new local government.
We are, as McIntosh knows, reviewing water services policy to ensure that the issues and the approaches to be taken are well understood by all concerned. Again, we would hope that the DA would participate constructively in this process rather than sniping from the sidelines and reverting to crude anti-Communist attacks on myself and Buyelwa Sonjica, who so ably chairs the parliamentary portfolio committee. As a party with pretensions to govern, if only at local government level, surely the DA has views on the division of powers between local and district municipalities, on the procedures to finance water schemes, on citizens’ participation in the water service planning process?
McIntosh’s only contribution is to suggest that we establish an independent water regulator. We would dearly like to know how he thinks this will help bring water to the poor.
The only smoke and mirrors are those invoked by McIntosh. To suggest that there is a sleight of hand in our approach does him no credit. Rather than use the transparency with which my department approaches parliamentary briefings to improve their performance, he prefers to conjure up cheap and inaccurate jibes. These may serve his party’s facile political agenda of denying the many achievements of the government since 1994. They do not help to improve policy. Neither do they serve the interests of the poor or the development of our country.
Ronnie Kasrils MP is Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry