We hear daily about extended water cuts to suburbs in our large metropoles. Let’s be clear, these cuts are not due to a shortage of water. The Vaal dam is 70% full and the Sterkfontein dam is over 100% full. Only 58% of the water supplied by Rand Water, the bulk supplier reaches the end user. This means that 42% the water pumped by Joburg water to its customers is lost in their reticulation system. The loss is the result of an infrastructure that has not been maintained and upgraded for 30 years. It’s no coincidence that the ANC government has ruled for 30 years!
Some municipalities (mainly DA led) have proactively replaced old concrete-asbestos and steel pipes with HDPE and Pvc pipes which have longer design lives and need less maintenance. This has required the municipalities to draw up a methodical preventative maintenance plan to replace all the pipes and valves in specified suburbs. The Johannesburg municipality on the other hand has approached the problem on an ad hoc basis attending to pipe bursts as and when they occur. This has boged down teams of workers attending to one emergency after another.
We live in an age of “smart cities” which Ramaphosa promised he would deliver in Johannesburg, but of course the devastation we witness shows the degree of his failure. What a “smart city” offers is a control room displaying the whole reticulation system. The second a leak occurs the location is immediately identified and attended to. The second a pressure drop or a blockage occurs the screen lights up and a team of workers is sent to the site. Instead, we endure weekly meetings of mostly incompetent and overpaid “cadre deployees” out of their depths trying to guess to find solutions to the problems.
We have a department of water affairs that has consistently failed to spend the allocated funds where they are needed. The budget allocated to water infrastructure, even assuming it would be spent correctly is way too little and getting less each year. So the problems will persist and grow. Where are all the overpaid Cuban water engineers that we have employed as an insult to our local engineers? What have they done to resolve any of our water problems?
What has become of the treaties signed with Iran to attend to our desalination plants? There is scarcely a desalination plant that is functioning as it should. We are paying a heavy and unjustified price for the political friends that we have chosen to be our partners!
On the other hand, we have spurned countries, such as Israel and partners that can offer real assistance. Israeli water engineers have visited our country to offer assistance only to knock on closed doors. Israel is a water scarce country, far worse than South Africa, which actually exports water to its neighbours. It has a central planning Water Authority “Mekorot” that operates its water network much as a “smart city”, which at any moment can identify inputs and outputs. When the head of Mekorot visited South Africa recently he was frozen out of contacts with government.
While our mayors are speculating about pipes running dry and struggling to deal with airlocks and water hammer once the pipes are refilled with water, Israel boasts a world leading company “Ari” that produces air valves that can solve all our air release problems. While our experts are blaming valves for being shut, when they should be open Israel boasts a host of valve companies, like “Dorot”, “Bermad”,” Raphael” and many more that can offer automated solutions to avoid the problems from arising in the first place.
We are paying a steep price for the friends we have chosen and we have brought disaster on ourselves for casting out the friends that can really help us to avoid catastrophe. All our problems are self-inflicted and imposed on the hapless population by a political party that cares more about its “comrades “than its own people.
