POLOKWANE – Mayor Thembi Nkadimeng has vowed to don her tackies and take to the streets to enforce the water restriction of 20Kl per household in the city.
The municipality hosted a water indaba in the city last Friday as part of creating a platform to facilitate engagement around critical water challenges facing the municipality.
Nkadimeng further said all persons caught watering their gardens would be cut off from water with immediate effect and a spot fine would be issued. She said the water supply would also be cut off when the limit was reached.
A second transgression would lead to their water supply being cut permanently, she said, even if the municipality had to go to constitutional court to protect the rights of the poor who did not have water as a result of the selfishness of the rich, who thought they could use as much water as they wanted because they could pay for it, in the process infringing on the rights of the poor who did not have water.
“They cannot water their grass and beautify their gardens as long as others do not have water,” she said. “They violate the rights of others. Our people need water.”
She said everyone should share scarce resources, and water was a very scarce resource in the city.
The moratorium on new development due to the shortage of water impacted on social economic development, she said.
She further said among other steps, the municipality would intensify its programme on cost recovery in rural areas, disconnection of illegal connections, installation of smart metering and intensification of conservation campaigns, but she stressed that the immediate solution to the challenges in Polokwane was conservation of water.
The city receives around 96Ml of water from its sources, but needs 120Ml with restrictions. “We are normally short by 18Ml per day and at peak usage 76Ml per day,” she said. The city’s old infrastructure was a huge challenge with more than 8Ml per day wasted due to burst pipelines. There was insufficient funding for maintenance and replacement, and theft of electric cables and pumps were further challenges, she said.
Nkadimeng said she would start visiting housing complexes this week to warn them not to water their gardens, as it would mean the complex’s water would be cut.
She said her plea to the department of water affairs to source more water for Polokwane from the Ebenezer dam was met with the response that the dam was already overutilised and that no more water could be sourced for the city. Water from the De Hoop dam would only be available to the city around 2030, when the pipelines were finalised.
According to Lepelle Northern Water manager of projects and GIS, Dr Carel Schmahl, another source that was being exploited was the recovery of water from waste effluent at treatment plants in the city. Schmahl said this process could add 20Ml to the water supply in the city, but it needed stringent measures in testing and purifying.
Schmahl said the water demand by Polokwane currently exceeded the available supply despite the fact that Lepelle Northern Water operated its current schemes above licence and capacity, and that Polokwane has instituted punitive water restrictions and were limiting development.
He further said the inflow into the Polokwane and Seshego wastewater plants exceeded their design capacity and this could result in final effluent that did not meet the required standard. “A new regional wastewater treatment plant is very urgently needed.”
