Lekwa municipality cleaning-up amid criminal charges for poor water

The Lekwa local municipality is among 13 municipalities which were criminally charged for having the poorest wastewater treatment plants and failing to implement corrective action plans.

But since March, there seems to have been slight improvement in correcting the wastewater treatment plants, with some ranging between 9% and 40% complete.

Minister of water and sanitation Senzo Mchunu visited the municipality in Mpumalanga on Friday to assess the progress of the intervention projects which address the water problems. This after the minister committed R350m last year to deal with such issues.

The department’s Green Drop Watch Report for 2022, which looks at the quality of water and wastewater infrastructure, was presented this week by Mchunu and the director-general, Dr Sean Phillips, this week.

It found that the municipality’s Standerton and Morgenzon wastewater treatment plants received a poor Green Drop score of 16.7% and 21% respectively. The municipality’s water services institution was given a low Green Drop score of 17%.

Criminal charges were laid against the municipality in 2020 for noncompliance and negligently or intentionally polluting the Standerton wastewater treatment plant.

The municipality was also requested to submit a corrective action plan but failed to do so and by March 20203, zero effort had been made to restore the wastewater treatment plants, the report found.

According to the department, a plea and sentence agreement has been drafted and will be confirmed by a magistrate on June 20.

Despite this, Mchunu visited the Standerton extension 8 sewer pipeline project, the Rooikopen booster pump station project, the Standerton water treatment works and the Concor drainage site.

“I am happy that we have started. Some of the programmes are at 40%, some at 9%, some at 18% completion but they have all started ... We need to pick up [the pace] because the programmes that we need to complete are quite essential for the people here both qualitatively and quantitatively,” he said.

The department will send officials back to the municipality to focus on quality and completion of the refurbishment of the treatment plants to meet the expected quality standards.

Meanwhile, the department had slapped 13 municipalities, mostly in Mpumalanga, with criminal charges.

Five are in Mpumalanga, three in Gauteng, two each in Limpopo and the Free State and one in the Western Cape.

The department’s Andile Tshona told TimesLIVE that the criminal charges are part of regulatory actions against water services authorities for various infringements of the National Water Act including failure to submit and implement corrective action plans.

The cases opened in Lyndenburg (Mpumalanga) and Randfontein (Gauteng) have been finalised through a plea and sentence agreement, he said.

“For Standerton, an agreement has been drafted. For all others, the investigation is ongoing.”

Three hundred and thirty-four municipal wastewater treatment plants were identified to be in a critical state across 90 municipalities last year.

The municipalities were issued with noncompliance letters and requests for corrective action plans, but only half responded — and with requests for support from the department.

Tshona says the department goes through various actions before opening a criminal case against local governments.

“Where these cases predate the Green Drop 2022 report, the further noncompliance of failure to submit an action plan is added to the investigation.”

Speaking in Standerton, Mchunu said they were low in terms of meeting the standards of good quality water.

“This is because of the functionality of the plant. Because it’s not functioning optimally, the results will follow suit and that is our challenge,” he said.

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