DA calls on Nelson Mandela Bay to stop using water from ‘nearly empty’ Kouga Dam

The DA in the Eastern Cape has called for the Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality to cease all extraction of water from the Kouga Dam “if the residents of the Kouga municipality and the farmers of the Gamtoos River Valley were to survive”.

The DA claims the metro’s supply dams were at just 5.6% capacity, of which 3.1% was unusable.

This comes after the party claimed in March that the municipality only had five weeks of water left, but the municipality disputed that matter.

“It has been calculated that the Kouga Dam will be at 5.6% of capacity by the end of June. Furthermore, 3.1% of this total is dead capacity, as it cannot be extracted from the dam,” said DA provincial Leader Nqaba Bhanga in a statement on Tuesday.

Bhanga said the DA would write to the department of water and sanitation (DWS) and Nelson Mandela Bay’s interim executive mayor and acting city manager, requesting them to act on the matter.

“NMB can counteract the shortfall created by not extracting water from the Kouga Dam by making use of demand reduction, water pressure reduction, and by maximising extraction from the Nooitgedacht Scheme,” he said.

The provincial leader said the department of water affairs had confirmed that NMB’s daily water consumption increased to 329 megalitres in March, which meant that the metro was extracting more than the recommended 250 megalitres per day.

“The main reason for this overconsumption is the municipality’s total lack of communication to create public awareness.

“With this in mind, the DA has launched the ‘Let’s defeat Day Zero in NMB!’ webpage. This page is a one-stop site and residents can go to https://www.da.org.za/defeat-day-zero-in-nmb to get all the water information that is critical to saving our supply dams from day zero,” he said.

Bhanga said the metro needed to operationalise its “Plan B” for mitigating the water crisis, which entailed building or upgrading water infrastructure to ensure that water from Nooitgedacht could also be reticulated to the western and southern regions of the bay.

He said the DA recommended that the metro should make emergency budget virements to ensure that infrastructure projects were funded and completed, and that the municipality should embark on emergency procurement processes to ensure that contracts were awarded and work commenced.

“Issues with SMMEs are the main reason the project to provide additional capacity to the Nooitgedacht Scheme from the Canal in the Sundays River Valley is at a standstill. The DA will write to the department of water affairs and ask it to intervene,” the provincial leader said.

Bhanga said water supply to schools should be disconnected and only reconnected when schools reopened and hospitals in the western and southern areas must be advised to install groundwater supply systems.

“If we all work together and are willing to sacrifice, we can avert this looming water tragedy,” he concluded.

(Compiled by Molefe Seeletsa)

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