Bulk water supply to follow electricity?

While Eskom is getting fed up with non-paying residents of particularly Soweto, "another Eskom" challenge could be looming for South Africans if more money is not made available for bulk water infrastructure maintenance, reports the South African Revenue Protection Association (SARPA) in its latest newsletter.

SARPA reports that according to the chief financial officer of the Department of Water and Environment Affairs, Onesmus Ayaya, South Africa's bulk water infrastructure was in danger of collapse and that water prices would have to be revised. He added that many of the more than 400 infrastructure assets that supply raw bulk water were decades old and were causing contamination of major water sources.

Ayaya told Parliament's Standing Committee on Appropriations, which is dissecting government departments' budget priorities, that the pricing structure of bulk water provision was being reconsidered.

He also mentioned that the new pricing strategy was being discussed with National Treasury.

However, the economic crunch has led the department to scale down radically its capital spending on water schemes and infrastructure refurbishment. In the next three years, it will receive only R4.8 billion of the R6bn it requires for infrastructure refurbishment, although it has been assured of R6.1bn to expand regional bulk infrastructure.
A local government water and sanitation audit report released earlier this year showed that 85% of South Africa's waste water treatment works had a "limited remaining useful life", while 90% of water treatment works were dilapidated.

In the meantime, water quality in KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga, North West and the Northern Cape was below acceptable health levels.

Eskom’s Soweto woes

It is alleged that in Soweto, only 20% of households pay for the electricity they use. According to many residents in Soweto, they know that they are breaking the law, but claim that "there is no life without electricity".

One resident said, after power was cut to her two-bedroom house: “In the morning we can’t drink tea, we can’t cook, we can’t eat, we can’t do anything. And it’s even worse for the small children to attend school and to study at night without electricity.”

Eskom, however, is losing patience. The utility's Bandile Jack explained that not having a job and struggling does not give you permission to do a criminal activity.

Eskom is fed up and is now stepping up its fight against electricity thieves who, it claims, drain the power giant’s coffers. It is a cost that the state-owned supplier can ill afford.
But certain residents have vowed to continue, claiming that they do not have much money or resources to fight Eskom, but physically and emotionally – by intensifying and by building more teams on the ground to illegally reconnect non-payers' electricity – "that’s when they’ll feel the pressure".

A South African investigative television programme recently quoted a leaked Eskom report showing a 35% revenue loss in May in the residential sector, mostly due to energy theft and meters that reflect free supply.

Aside from this, outstanding Soweto electricity bills accounted nearly R2bn of close to R3bn owed, the programme said.

Sarpa was founded in 1997 by the Association of Municipal Electricity Undertakings (Southern Africa), Eskom and the Institute of Municipal Finance Officers to promote the exchange of information and finding of solutions in the field of protecting the income and assets of utilities against pilfering, misapplication and misappropriation.