Nelson Mandela Bay is once again facing a water management crisis.
Water scarcity is not a temporary situation, and we are not alone.
Ongoing water outages and shortages in Johannesburg due to multiple systems failures have regularly made national headlines over the past year; while Knysna is currently in crisis with only days of water supply left in its dam and other Garden Route towns such as Plettenberg Bay and George are under severe water restrictions due to dwindling dam levels.
From Makhanda to Middelburg to Kei Mouth in the Eastern Cape, to a number of towns in the Free State and Northern Cape, the story is similar – not only drought but also overuse and mismanagement of water resources and infrastructure, leading to disruptions in water supply and prolonged outages.
Municipalities implementing planned “water-shedding” is an increasing reality in many of these places (Kei Mouth and Cwili were limited to water every second day earlier this month), along with unexpected and often-prolonged lack of water or reduced supply, and punitive tariffs.
To put it into global perspective, the United Nations released a report in January stating that the world has “moved beyond a water crisis and into a state of global water bankruptcy”.
Crisis implies a temporary shock followed by recovery, but what is now emerging in many regions, including in Africa, is a state of bankruptcy – where the “natural capital” of water is no longer renewable due to pollution and overuse, and damage to resources such as wetlands is irreversible.
This results in persistent water shortages where natural systems can no longer return to “normal” levels or historical baselines.
Nelson Mandela Bay might not be in such a dire situation, yet, but we are nonetheless in a crisis that is not temporary.
The reasons are complex and inter-connected, but to break it down into three key points:
- Ongoing drought, with dwindling dam levels and insufficient rainfall to top them up.
As of last week, the usable water in the dams supplying Nelson Mandela Bay was at just over a third (35.2%) of their capacity.
It is important to understand that those dams are a shared resource. Their capacity or available storage does not “belong” entirely to the metro. NMB has an allocation from the Department of Water & Sanitation (DWS), which we are currently exceeding, while the DWS also allocates water from those dams to farmers and residents in the Kouga region, such as Jeffreys Bay, Humansdorp, Hankey, Loerie and Patensie.
- The uncomfortable part for consumers to face – we are all simply wasting or using too much water. Water consumption in the metro is tracking at over 380 million litres per day, against a target of 280 million litres per day.
The target is not random; it is based on the metro’s population, allocations to the metro by the DWS from both the Algoa system dams and the Gariep Dam via the Nooitgedagt treatment works, and indicators of infrastructure reliability, system interconnectivity and sustainability of dam levels.
- The uncomfortable part for the municipality – unacceptably high losses of treated water due to leaks that run for far too long, infrastructure vandalism, illegal connections, theft, meter tampering and incorrect billing, now running at over 60% of the metro’s daily water consumption.
That is about 230 million litres of clean water per day literally going down the drain, without generating much-needed revenue for the municipality.
The public anger at the municipality’s lack of control over these losses is understandable. However, this does not justify ignoring appeals to save water.
Two wrongs do not make a right.
In a perfect world, if all the service delivery shortcomings could be resolved overnight, then we would not be in the situation we are now.
But we don’t live in a perfect world and the reality is there are high levels of vacancies in municipal service delivery departments and delays in appointing external contractors
The reality is also that we live in a drought-prone region in a water-scarce country, in a world on the verge of water-bankruptcy.
Clean water is not an infinite resource and, despite our frustrations, it is incumbent on us as responsible citizens to do what we can to conserve a scarce resource.
Then, there is the thorny question of water supply from Nooitgedagt, seen by some in the Bay as the “silver bullet” to solve all our water problems.
This water, that travels from the vast Gariep Dam, SA’s largest, on the Orange River straddling the Free State and Northern Cape, via the Orange-Fish-Sundays River Water scheme, enters Gqeberha via the Nooitgedagt treatment works.
It may sound like a vast resource, but a) it cannot supply the entire NMB metro, the municipal distribution network was not designed for that; and b) it is another shared resource, designed to supplement agricultural irrigation, industrial use and municipal supply in the broader, drought-prone Eastern Cape.
NMB’s target water production through the Nooitgedagt treatment works is 190 MLD, currently running at 181 MLD – not sufficient to meet demand, even taking losses into the equation, and bearing in mind it can’t service the entire metro.
The metro is also already exceeding the usage from this source in terms of its water use licence.
This puts Nelson Mandela Bay at the very real risk of rotational water-shedding, should the DWS enforce water abstraction licence conditions and ration water supplies in order to ensure equitable supply.
The key fact is, whichever way you look at it, we all need to do what we can to conserve and renew a resource that is critical for sustaining life. We cannot sit back and think the problem will solve itself and need to look at this in the same way as the contingency planning which we had to undertake during loadshedding, when electricity availability was constrained. This is why the Chamber is re-igniting its Adopt A School and Adopt a Leak initiatives, and is urging its members to conserve water and put back-up solutions in place.
- Basil Mugwagwa is the Chair of the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber’s Water and Sanitation Task Team
