That Gauteng could approach its own 'day zero' when the province’s feeder dams are about 90% full, speaks to institutional and government failure of a special sort.
That drip, drip, drip you hear is the sound of an entirely new class of bureaucrats shifting the blame for their own failings.
Leaving aside the “50%-plus leakage” for a moment, there’s the disingenuity of blaming both a heatwave and Eskom’s load-shedding for the province’s suddenly empty reservoirs. While these and municipal “system crashes” may offer an easy scapegoat, that rather suggests that rolling blackouts are a novel phenomenon — not a 15-year blight on SA.
Only, Eskom explains that while regulations exempt SA’s seat of government from power cuts, reservoirs and hospitals are fed by the lines that supply ordinary residents. That means it’s the municipalities themselves that have to isolate such points — surely wholly in their power and wholly doable, even if it means exempting an entire area from load-shedding to keep the taps running.
The municipalities, for their part, will wail about resource constraints. But that’s largely a problem of their own making. Consider the figures from the City of Joburg’s most recent annual report. Never mind the R272m-odd racked up in irregular expenditure for “water” and Joburg Water combined — that’s Monopoly money in the municipal game. “Nonrevenue water” — unbilled and unmetered water, as well as physical and commercial losses — cost the city R2.4bn in the past financial year.
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