It’s all about the bugs and chemical nasties that potentially threaten our social ecology.
Believe it or not, the places in which we live, like the tarred roads on which we travel, all come from a natural ecosystem surrounding us. We are an
integral part of the environment. It ensures our existence. But we tend to manipulate things. We carelessly extract from nature, pollute and seldom restore.
We assume we are at the ‘top of the food chain’. Therefore, we change the natural world to serve our purposes. It is dangerous. Nature, more than often, strikes back with a vengeance.
In the case of water, apart from climate change, we have limited control of the ecosystem – thanks to a much-forgiving natural water recycling system.
The warm sun on the earth, together with the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the atmosphere, enables the water cycle to constantly come to our rescue with the gift of rain.
Meanwhile we continue to, sometimes carelessly, use tap water in our homes and industrial production processes.
Various types of wastewater, flowing back to the rivers, are biologically and chemically laden with bug-filled and toxic substances.
South Africa’s water sector has a sophisticated team of water quality experts, constantly monitoring water.
Only in the sub-catchments of the Vaal Barrage and Vaal Dam more than 200 sites are sampled to update experts on local water quality conditions. It is important. In 2000-1, South Africa had a serious cholera outbreak, when in rural KwaZulu-Natal 80 387 cases were reported and 168 people died. By 2009, South Africa was prone to a cholera pandemic in which thousands of Zimbabwians died after Harare’s municipal water treatment system had collapsed.
At the time in South Africa, we could prevent massive outbreaks of cholera.
Fortunately for us, the water authorities introduced the National Blue Drop and Green Drop campaign in 2008. Countrywide water supply and wastewater systems were subject to independent assessments to comply to strict national quality guidelines.
The campaign, introduced by the then Water and Environmental Affairs Minister, Buyelwa Sonjica, was in itself the result of an awareness of the need for sound water quality. The penny dropped in 2007 when the rural Mpumalanga town of Delmas, with 50 000 residents, reported the deaths of 649 people, as a result of typhoid and diarrhoea.
There had been earlier outbreaks in 1993 and 2005 in Delmas. But 2007 was the worst. Delmas’ groundwater that locals had been drinking since the early 1900s, had become polluted by sewage that had siphoned into what had previously been a vast pristine underground aquifer filled with clean water. Government’s response was the Blue and Green Drop Campaign. Local authorities had to speed up service delivery. For four years
the country’s water quality experts could build up a valuable databases of water and wastewater problems.
At the time, many of South Africa’s municipal water and sanitation systems had started collapsing. It was the result of rapid urban population growth and the inability of local water and wastewater infrastructure to stay ahead of the demand for more services. Many municipalities’ residents no longer paid municipal rates and taxes. Those funds formerly paid for infrastructure upgrades.
In 2014, the National Department of Water and Sanitation introduced the ‘No Drop’ Campaign. All municipal water and sanitation services had to comply with the national standard. That ideal has not yet been realised. The ‘No Drop’ Campaign started at a time when South Africa entered a countrywide drought that only ended in early 2020. If current predictions are on the mark, we will have wetter summers in the years to come.
In the catchments of the Vaal Dam and Barrage, both Rand Water and the Department of Water and Sanitation have been creating public awareness. We have to be wary of algal blooms and eutrophication. Water experts want government to reintroduce the Blue and Green Drop Campaign. Rand Water maintained a strict internal adherence to the Blue/ Green Drop data system, up to 2017.
Judging from their annual potable water quality reports, Gauteng’s municipalities remain safe. However, smaller municipalities, downstream of the Vaal Barrage, are vulnerable. They are the recipients of wastewater from upstream municipal wastewater treatment systems that still do not consistently comply to national standards.
* The author is an extraordinary professor in the Faculty of Humanities at North-West University’s Vanderbijlpark Campus.
