With the Vaal Dam currently at 36% capacity, Maphangula reportedly said that 26 municipalities in the Integrated Vaal River System (IVRS), upstream of Emfuleni, were responsible for the wastewater spills.
He reportedly said the Department would take charge of restoring the system that has been severely disrupted since 2018. Apparently R1 billion has been made available for the work. The lion’s share of about R900 million was earmarked for Emfuleni, while the remainder of the funds were earmarked for upstream work on dysfunctional wastewater treatment systems.
Over the weekend it transpired that the Department of Water and Sanitation had not shared any of the information with key Emfuleni role players. Willy Bila, Emfuleni Local Municipality’s Administrator, appointed by Gauteng’s provincial government, said he was aware of ongoing talks between DWS and Emfuleni.
One of the key role players in Emfuleni’s current wastewater crisis is Mr Patrick Ngoepe, the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs’ official, responsible for water and sanitation. He could not be reached for more information on the matter.
SAVE’s Rosemary Anderson, who has been at the helm of SAVE’s extensive talks with Minister Lindiwe Sisulu since 2019, was surprised by the DWS disclosures at the Vaal Dam.
In an email statement Anderson explained that, in hindsight, three mistakes had been made in recent years in dealing with the Vaal River Barrage’s wastewater crisis.
• Emfuleni’s water service authority, Metsi-a-Lekoa, had not been provided with the necessary budget, tools and manpower to do what they were mandated to do.
Neither did Metsi received the necessary sustainable budget funding. There had also not been proper succession planning. No reputable professional had been in the field of water and sanitation.
• Professional engineers had been excluded from participation since the start in 2018 of the critical interventions at the Sebokeng Regional Wastewater works by the South African National Defence Force (SANDF) and ERWAT.
Only experienced engineers, with their professional reputations at stake, would ultimately have been able to do the work.
• There had been no outside oversight in the fields of auditing, quantity surveying, engineering and law, whilst the work was done on Emfuleni’s wastewater infrastructure.
Freedom Front Plus Councillor, Gerda Senekal, said if the statements made at the Vaal Dam were true, the project was bound to fail. Making available R900 million to Emfuleni Local Municipality only opened the way for corruption.
By working more parsimoniously and to the book with government funding, Emfuleni could do the work with much less funding, she pointed out.
The DA’s Provincial Spokesperson on the environment, Janho Engelbrecht, said that R1 billion was far too little to address all the problems in the Vaal River System.
“Emfuleni is a nightmare. The Vaal’s ecosystem has been damaged to the extent that it causes great harm to the country’s downstream farming operations.
“To resolve Gauteng’s wastewater problems, requires far more than government’s R1 billion. It is too little, too late.
They have not even started addressing the issue of eliminating the heavy salt loads in the ‘treated acid mine drainage’ in the Ekurhuleni area,” he said.
OUTA’s Wayne Duvenage said: “If the past is something to go by, it all depends on who they bring and who is in control of the procurement process. What we would like to see is absolute transparency in the procurement process.
“We can only go by what we see. There has to be an appointment of professional people and not cadre deployment. And lack of transparency may just let the project fail,” he said.
* The author is an extraordinary professor at North-West University’s Vanderbijlpark Campus
R1 billion for Vaal’s wastewater recovery plan
Key Emfuleni stakeholders were overlooked when Simon Maphangula, Director of water services at the Department of Water and Sanitation, last week told journalists that Emfuleni’s wastewater problems would be sorted out in the next three years.
