SA’s water crisis 20 years in the making

South Africa’s dams, lakes and rivers, contaminated with sewage, litter and E. coli were a 20-year water crisis in the making.

Water expert Professor Anthony Turton said there has been a water crisis in South Africa for the past two decades.

“In 2002, the National Water Strategy Document said we were fundamentally water construed and will be water constrained by 2025, so we have been on a slow-onset disaster since,” he said.

Turton said they all knew exactly what was going on in terms of the water decay.

“While this was happening, the government had different priorities. They’ve chosen to purge the technically competent people out the system and deployed trainers, so it was a political decision,” he said.

After a two-day National Water and Sanitation Summit, which ended on Saturday, “strict time frames to improve the country’s state of water and sanitation service delivery” were set.

Water and sanitation department spokesperson Sputnik Ratau said the primary issues were capacity, especially at local government level.

“There has been a decision to bring back the blue and green drop reporting mechanisms which the department always had. That is really going to help us,” he said.

Ratau said the department will quarterly evaluate how far they have come since the summit.

Turton said from a technical position there were no surprises.

“It’s a continuous misdiagnosis of the problem, because the fundamental problem is that SA ran out of water in 2002.”

He said the country should have then changed policy direction to moving towards recycling and deceleration.

A person needed two litres of water a day to survive, he said.

“The two litres were to survive the day and to cook, but that was at survival level; you can’t bath and grow any vegetables with so little water.”

Turton said 250 litres of water per person was needed daily if you wanted to bath, wash dishes, and water the garden.

“You needed 2 000 litres of water per day per person if you wanted to eat. For every calorie of food you eat, it takes that to produce that calorie. So a diet of 2 000 calories a day means two tons of water per person per day, just to keep that person in food,” he said.

“Everyone thinks only about the drinking water and flushing the toilet, but they completely forget about the water to sustain the economy and the water for our food.”

Turton said if there were 60 million people in South Africa, two tons of water per day per person was needed to feed everybody in the country per day.

“We don’t need stricter laws. We need to employ technically competent people and hold them accountable. It’s not rocket science,” he said.

Last year, water experts at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) called on the country to exercise caution when using water, as supply is under great pressure and demand continues to rise.

CSIR media relations manager David Mandaha said SA remains a water-scarce country and is ranked among the 30 driest countries in the world. Gauteng is a summer rainfall region and, despite recent rains, the country is still susceptible to sustained droughts, exacerbated by climate change.

Ratau said the department needed partnerships because the government doesn’t have the money and expertise.

“We are looking to get solutions and looking at the issue of ageing infrastructure or replacement or the refurbishment, depending on conditions,” he said.

“We need to ensure we not only save water and use it better, but also share the water with other communities along the pipeline,” he said.

– marizkac@citizen.co.za

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