Few people have the energy to plough through government department annual reports, whose cumbersome format, prescribed by regulation, is often less than informative. The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry, of which I was the director general until recently, had attempted to go beyond that format to highlight key “outcomes” in short “state of the sector” summaries.
However, until Roger Ronnie’s article (“Only the tip of the tap”, September 30), little attention was paid to the startling information contained in the 2003/04 report, which stated bluntly that “only 43% of local government is adhering to water quality requirements” and further that “the figures reflect local government’s perceived level of service quality”.
That is, the claims had not been independently audited and the situation could be even worse. It was these findings that Minister Buyelwa Sonjica returned to in her budget speech in May this year.
Those water quality standards represent two centuries of global wisdom about the protection of public health. If, as a nation, we were really concerned about the state of our services, surely we would have been clamouring to know what was happening. But even the parliamentary portfolio committee, formally charged with overseeing the sector, did not appear to find the comments particularly remarkable.
There was a similar lack of reaction to a series of reports detailing the challenges of “river health”, which highlight pollution by munici-pal sewerage works. Again, these were highlighted in the minister’s budget speech when she said: “There are serious problems in the management of waste-water treatment works … An acute example is Emfuleni, in Gauteng where, repeatedly, untreated sewage has been discharged into the Vaal River.”
But does anyone actually listen? These comments were surely red lights, warning of problems to come. Why do we have to have a Delmas incident before the reports are dusted off?
The challenge is hardly new. In 1999, then minister of water affairs and forestry Kader Asmal said: “We must ensure that the infrastructure we provide is properly managed, even if it means spending less to put pipes in the ground.”
So while Ronnie is correct when he notes that these problems were again highlighted by Kevin Wall of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research at the Regulation for Poverty Alleviation conference earlier this year, it is hardly for the first time. Wall’s presentation reinforced my comments at the same meeting.
In addressing the challenges, I emphasised that we cannot continue to treat metros and village councils in the same manner: “It is clearly not appropriate to regulate world-class, self-funding utilities and municipalities in the same way as we do the poorer rural municipalities that depend entirely on government grants … and find it difficult to recruit managers with the minimum competences required. But how do we reflect this in a single national regulatory framework?”
This dangerous combination of arrogance, ignorance and populism came together with fatal results in Delmas. And it is this, combined with dysfunctional local government oversight, that is undermining our gains in service delivery.
The need for structured guidance and regulation of municipalities and their senior staff is obvious. And it is surely time now for the authorities responsible for local government to address the challenge facing key municipal services. They can do this:
- by simplifying the framework in which poor municipalities work;
- by putting in place regional service providers to take over from failed municipalities, deploying limited technical capacity where it can have most impact (as is already being done with electricity services);
- by setting out clear guidelines for the competences that municipal staff should have and putting in place structured training programmes to ensure that incumbents are given the opportunity to qualify; and
- by giving national sector departments the ability to intervene quickly and effectively in problem municipalities in weeks rather than, as at present, in years.
Until there is a change in approach, epidemics and natural disasters will continue to be the water managers’ main friends and allies, drawing political attention to the real challenges of service provision but always too late, after the damage has been done.