The foul waters left behind by hurricane Katrina in the United States have not claimed a single typhoid victim, but in Delmas, Mpumalanga, government chaos has resulted in two typhoid deaths — and the number of fatalities is rising.
Minister of Health Manto Tshabalala-Msimang has blamed the typhoid outbreak in Delmas on local authorities, and Democratic Alliance MP Dan Maluleke says evidence points to ”poor planning on the municipality’s part”.
The outbreak occurs in the middle of a massive transfer programme of water services schemes to municipalities by the national Department of Water Affairs and Forestry. Minister Buyelwa Sonjica told the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) earlier this year that she expected all water services to be in the hands of municipal authorities by March 2006.
”Water is a life-and-death matter. We often speak of cooperative governance, but less often are able to effectively put it into practice,” Sonjica told the NCOP.
By late Wednesday, two Delmas residents had died, more than 400 had symptoms of typhoid and health facilities were treating at least 400 cases of diarrhoea a day. The figures are expected to rise in the next three to six weeks because of the incubation period of the disease.
Helgard Muller, executive manager: water services in the water affairs and forestry department, said ”poor management of sewage works spilling into underground water as well as inadequate disinfection of water supplies” were among the reasons for the outbreak. Overloading of the sewage system and the bucket system used by Botleng township residents have also been blamed.
The DA’s Maluleke said the Delmas municipal manager, Tefo Kadi, should be called before Parliament’s portfolio committee on water affairs to explain the tragedy. The DA had warned the municipal council three years ago to obtain ”safe” drinking water from Rand Water, but this suggestion was rejected, as the council believed it would be too expensive.
”They felt the free source of underground water could be a source of easy income for the municipality,” Maluleke told African Eye News Service in Nelspruit.
Two weeks ago, water affairs portfolio committee chairperson Connie September noted during a briefing by the national sanitation task team overseeing the transfer of services that most municipalities planned sanitation and water schemes in isolation. An integrated plan involving the Department of Housing, the Department of Provincial and Local Government and the water affairs department was needed.
An estimated 16-million people in South Africa still live without basic sanitation and 231 000 households across the country use the bucket system. At least 800 000 household sanitation units have to be introduced every year in order to reach the government target of wiping out the backlog by 2010. Meanwhile, residents of Delmas are demanding to know why this is the second typhoid outbreak they have experienced in the past 12 years. When Sonjica visited the area on Monday, she said the past problems indicated it was the overloaded sewage system seeping into the ground water that people are using.
”There is a lack of capacity at local government to manage ground water, and this is an issue that the department needs to look at,” the minister said.