Rand Water must not renege on its responsibilities

Football is one of the most popular sports in South Africa, but when responsibility becomes a political football it is most unsavoury.

The division between local, provincial and national government lays the groundwork for just this sort of thing.

We have witnessed the bad effects of Eskom. As it is a national entity, it feels that it doesn’t have to answer to municipalities. This flies in the face of the consumers’ act as it is the supplier of electricity to the municipalities;

hence, it is a supplier-customer relationship and if there are complaints they need to be addressed. This is a basic consumer right.

In the same way, Rand Water supplies Johannesburg, Ekurhuleni, Tshwane and Randfontein with water, which is then distributed by the municipalities.

For this purpose, Johannesburg for instance has over 11 000km of piping, which it has to maintain and upgrade.

For reasons such as financial constraints, the refurbishments and upgrades have slipped back over the years and our system is under huge pressure to cope.

Leaks occur more and more, which is understandable but we need the drive to encourage the public to report these as they happen.

Too often, people pass water running down the street and assume that someone has reported it, especially in areas where this is a daily occurrence. However, what is far more serious is the fact that we just cannot get the amount of water to meet the daily demand. Rand Water has failed to keep up with the rising water demand and thus our dams being full means nothing to the residents of Johannesburg as we are still on stage one water restrictions.

However, the city cannot engage constructively with Rand Water as it is a national entity and is only held liable by the national government. Again, we have the scenario of the supplier with the monopoly, not having to answer the clients’ complaints.

The bottleneck at Rand Water, be it because of the gravity-fed supply channel, the lack of capacity of the clarification plant or the lack of ability to feed to the municipalities has to be addressed urgently. The lack of capital investment over the years and the lack of planning are not acceptable.

The DA has taken note of this and has been trying to get the city to engage with Rand Water but this has fallen on deaf ears.

That is why the DA and its mayoral candidate Mpho Phalatse have made this a priority issue. Getting the residents involved to report and setting rigorous time limits on repairs of broken pipes and valves on the one side and engaging and putting pressure on the national government to force the necessary improvements to be implemented urgently at Rand Water are the two main components of this strategy.

As the DA, we will do everything in our power to avoid Rand Water becoming the next Eskom.

DA Johannesburg spokesperson on Water councillor Ralf Bittkau