While Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) officials are positive about their new minister, Senzo Mchunu, leading non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the water sector remain cynical about departmental capacity to deal with the country’s plethora of water and sanitation infrastructure maintenance and upgrades work.
Water sector NGOs are dedicated to securing maximum public participation at all levels of governance.
While they are critical of plans to reduce the number of catchment management agencies (CMAs) in the country from nine to six, they will, for now, watch what transpires.
“DWS will take at least another 20 years before it can take full charge of its responsibilities,” one NGO leader said in a discussion.
There will be sufficient support from grassroots, especially in the rural areas, to help new small farmers secure water resources.
But as long as DWS is understaffed and short of experienced skilled technical and scientific specialists, the department will continue to straddle along, the NGO insider said.
A senior DWS official was more optimistic. He stressed that Mchunu is an experienced leader, with a soundtrack record in education and political management.
DWS’s need for someone to ensure that funds are allocated properly, seems to speak to the minister’s skills set.
However, the jury remains out on local water and sanitation forums (W&SFs).
These were introduced in 2015 by DWS as a contingency measure to stop water and sanitation leaks in townships and informal settlements. W&SFs are different from the catchment management forums (CMFs).
The CMFs were established in the early 2000s to be local and regional operatives of the CMAs on matters of surface and groundwater quality monitoring.
CMFs in the Upper Vaal River catchment area will continue with their operations and prepare for absorption into far larger CMAs than before.
Insiders say, that is because the government does not want to create more state-owned entities (SOEs), of which ESKOM is a prime example.
SOEs have historically not been managed well and are problematic for the operations of local, provincial and national departments.
As for W&SFs, especially in the townships with plenty of leaks, NGOs remain critical. But they are willing to give the department the benefit of the doubt – for now.
In the former white urban residential areas, cynics abound. Local residents, they say, will probably identify water and sanitation leaks, report them to the local authority, and ultimately pay their own private contractors, regardless of their sound status as rates and taxpayers.
That is the current norm in many urban suburbs. From the DWS side, the response is that the government previously relied on councillors to engage with residents and then report back to a council committee on local water and sanitation.
It did not work well. New councillors will be “hand-picked”. In addition, more authority will rest with local residents in the W&SFs, operating in townships and informal settlements.
Whatever way we look at sewage and potable water leaks in Emfuleni, the problem of the polluted Vaal River Barrage will remain for some time to come.
There are no quick fixes to water and sanitation problems. There may be some low-hanging fruits that only require quick repairs, but it will be a long hard haul to do proper systemic repairs and maintenance on infrastructure issues.
Some systemic problems date back 30 years – the lifetime of one human generation.
The author is an extraordinary professor in the faculty of Humanities at North-West University’s Vanderbijlpark campus
