Green Economy Journal Issue 58

WATER
WATER
South Africa’s
WATER UPDATE
The South African water sector is facing all kinds of crises with an ill-equipped and sorely resourcedepleted
government that seeks to correct over a decade’s inactions. While this phenomenon
is not unique to the sector; without water security we have no hope of reviving the economy.
So, let’s take stock of where we are and what our options are going forward.
OPINION PIECE BY BENOÎT LE ROY, SA WATER CHAMBER
NATIONAL GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES
• National Water and Sanitation Master Plan published in 2018.
• National water security framework for South Africa updated.
• Water Summit held in Pretoria, March 2022.
• National Infrastructure Plan (NIP) 2050 published in 2022.
• National Water Resource Strategy 4 draft for public comment
published in 2022.
• Blue and Green Drop Reports published in 2022.
SOUTH AFRICAN REALITY
• Main themes out of the Master Plan such as non-revenue
water, reuse and desalination have not yet been implemented
in an overt and convincing manner at local government level
as mandated by legislation.
• Pollution of our water resources given the 97% sewage plants
not complying to Green Drop standards remain unchanged
with no visible mitigation actions made by local government.
Many court cases have been won by NGOs but there has been
no impactful enforcement of the court orders owing to the
lack of state capacity.
• Nelson Mandela Bay faces ongoing water shortages despite
government interventions to support new water initiatives.
• eThekwini suffered devastating floods in 2022 leaving much
of the metro’s water and sewage infrastructure damaged
on account of its poor state and consequent vulnerability.
The December holidaymakers failed to materialise because
of ongoing beach pollution by illegal sewage discharges that,
to this day, remain reportedly largely unchanged.
• Gauteng metros face weekly water disconnections owing to
failing municipal water assets and Rand Water outages, all
worsened by severe loadshedding.
One would easily surmise that the reality resembles a war
zone depiction but no, it’s not Ukraine or Sudan but South
Africa where society seems to take it on the chin and accept
that failing government services are here to stay and the new
normal. Most of the water-related problems we face have one root
cause, failed economic policy at all levels of government exacerbated
by severe governance failures resulting in reduced institutional
capacity to rebuild South Africa’s water security.
South Africa has a rounded-off population of 60-million and is ranked
as 25th in the world and fifth continentally by population size. We
simply cannot be ignored with such a significant population and a
relatively high GDP per capita on the continent. This means to me that
Loadshedding is
not a normal design
input anywhere in
the world.
we must sort out the water security as one of the continent’s top five
population and economic powers for the sake of all those around us
that invariably depend on us.
Water security is a fundamental economic lubricator, and the rollout
of the infrastructure upgrades and extensions are key developers of
crucial skills and a significant job creator. The implementation of the
Water and Sanitation Plan with a price tag of R900-billion in 2018
would generate at least R3.6-trillion in GDP triggering a multitude of
skills, supply chain and technology opportunities.
Many of the water value chain inputs are now imported due to
deindustrialisation and government in collaboration with the private
sector seeks to reverse this terminal trend with the adoption of the
Water and Sanitation Reindustrialisation Plan published in 2022. The
SA Water Chamber was established to catalyse the required publicprivate
collaboration to unlock these master plans and this principal,
loosely termed Private Sector Participation (PSP) is embedded in all
recent policies including the latest NIP 2050 phases one and two.
The chasm between national policy and local government
implementation is so stark that the former has embarked on
establishing the Water Partnership Office (WPO) in the Development
Bank of Southern Africa and the National Water Infrastructure Agency
within the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) to effectively
replace the Trans Caledon Water Authority (TCWA) and the DWS
construction entity.
These two initiatives are intended to provide project preparation
funding and implementation solutions on a programmatic basis with
the required skills in a semi-centralised supporting mechanism.
These entities would initially focus on reducing non-revenue water,
implementing reuse schemes and desalination plants along the coast
as espoused in the Water and Sanitation Master Plan.
We are now five years down the track of the Master Plan timeline of
10 years, so we have a decade’s worth of infrastructure to roll out by
2028. This is an extraordinary opportunity for South Africa, so we need
to start now!
Loadshedding is a daily problem for all South Africans. And when
it comes to water security, it’s a complex issue with very little that
municipalities can do to alleviate the stress – apart from alternative
energy sources that are generally far too expensive, as they are not
possible at utility scale in the towns. Metros in South Africa have
anything from 100 to 500 pump stations to provide water and evacuate
sewage. Cities are designed to operate with 24/7 electricity supply
feeding into these systems. Loadshedding is not a normal design input
anywhere in the world.
The result is that all electrical demands are being fed from a
single supply system, so loadshed the area and all consumers are
switched off from houses to shops, government buildings, clinics,
hospitals, police stations, schools as well as water and sewage
pump stations. Cities generally have 24 to 48 hours water storage in
reservoirs which are designed to be fed continuously by electrically
driven pump stations to keep them at adequate levels for the
required pressures in the system.
Periodic outages are catered for by the system’s embedded storage
capacity, but ongoing outages result in systems unable to keep
wet and they run dry. This leads to extraordinary damage when
refilling the pipelines due to excessive water hammer, especially
in the old vulnerable and dated systems in South Africa. Sewage
systems only have around four hours of storage time as the
maturation of the sewage can lead to odours as well as methane
and hydrogen sulphide emissions that are potentially lethal.
So, we sit on an additional time bomb on our aging and collapsing
water infrastructure that we are ill-equipped to mitigate. We must
not only capacitate local government in implementing the Water
and Sanitation Master Plan, but also do it without energy security
that serves to complicate and delay matters that will be costing us all
more. What an own goal.
It is very difficult to be positive about our country given the
progressive collapse of our basic services such as water, electricity
and logistics but “WE” have to mobilise a rather apathetic society to
embrace their duties and each with their own capacity contribute to
the inculcation of water security in our country. So, active citizenry
is a powerful tool and is starting to mobilise in the water sector, but
it has been unable to make any real dent in the rolling out of water
security, yet. This landscape is a complex decentralised one that needs
better governance, co-ordination and major PSP to unlock our water
required water security.
Water security is
a fundamental
economic lubricator.
In the next issue, I will uncover any major updates and share my
views on:
• Municipal budgets in the South African metropolitians for
water infrastructure
• Decentralised/package plant options
• Digitisation and digitalisation
• Desalination news
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