Rand Water's rocky road ahead

As suburbs around Joburg remain dry and the water crisis continues, Rand Water has opened up about the numerous challenges hampering the supply of clean water to households.

And while much is being done to rectify the situation speedily, the light ahead is shining down a very long tunnel littered with obstructions.

Ageing infrastructure, power blackouts, abstraction limits, increased demand, leaking and burst pipes, irregular municipal payments, mismanagement, population growth — the obstructions, according to Rand Water, are numerous.

“We are not blaming anyone. We don’t like to use that word, it’s not fair to say people are to ‘blame’. We are all partners in this together,” said Rand Water CEO Sipho Mosai.

Speaking at a media briefing at Rand Water headquarters in Glenvista on Friday, Mosai said smart solutions were needed, along with public engagement in finding smarter ways to do things.

“If I could do it, I would outlaw that alien species that is Kikuyu (grass). So much of our clean drinking water is sprinkled away on that water guzzler. We should be pouring greywater on vegetables, not clean water on grass,” Mosai said.

Outlining the main issues, he said Rand Water was a self-funding entity, the largest water utility in Africa with over 3,000km of large diameter pipelines, successfully bulk-supplying 5,500 mega litres of water to four of the country’s nine provinces every day.

Rand Water purifies its supply and pipes it out to a network of reservoirs from where it is drawn on by municipalities who then feed it on to the end consumer — each municipality managing that process independently.

However, a tough economy and the impact of the pandemic has seen some municipalities struggling to pay their water bills in full. While the City of Joburg has managed to keep stable, paying every 30 days, since 2018 Ekurhuleni has slipped paying every 59 days, Tshwane every 56 days and Emfuleni is now on 237 debtor days.

“This means that we currently are standing on R1.9bn, with R3.3bn or 64% of our revenue overdue,” said Mosai.

Despite this, he said, Rand Water was continuing to supply all the water it needs to — and occasionally even more.

“The fact is that there is enough water. There is more than enough for everybody. The big concern is how it is managed. Ideally the municipalities should be keeping their reservoirs at over 60% full for cases like this when there is a spike in demand. But that’s not what we are seeing.

The reservoirs are too low,” he said, adding that the knock-on effects of load-shedding on municipal water supplies could be absorbed only when the reservoirs are fuller.

A big reason for water pumps not functioning constantly to keep reservoirs full was power interruptions caused by load-shedding, breakdowns and “poor quality power supply” from Eskom.

Rand Water COO Mahlomola Mehlo, a civil engineer, said while the purification plants were national keypoints and therefore exempt from load-shedding, they had still been affected by power failure issues and had experienced four massive trips — the last one being on Sunday.

“It’s a multiplicity of issues which we are trying to respond to quickly, in line with a growth strategy that has us looking at alternative sources such as hydroelectric power and solar to mitigate these interruptions. But we are nowhere close to being out of Eskom’s grip yet,” he said.

Mosai said that while the recent surge in water consumption was a concern, it was not the biggest worry. Average consumption in Gauteng was close to 300 litres per person per day, significantly more than the global 222 litres per person per day.

“We have high consumption because we have people using drinking water for non-drinking purposes.

And so we are working with the municipalities to reduce their targets and to get people living in the low-lying suburbs to understand that if they put their sprinkler systems on, they reduce the pressure in the system and the result is that the taps run dry for people living in high-lying areas,” he said.

This was compounded by the fact that almost a third of all water was lost in the system and therefore not paid for. Asked what was being done to resolve this issue of leaks, bursts and theft, Mosai said: “We are looking to source funding for municipalities to fast track their projects to attend to the leaks speedily and to replace old and damaged infrastructure.

“This crisis is a wake-up call. There is no need to fear a day zero, we just need to find intelligent ways to ensure that the water we have lasts and that it reaches everyone.”

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