Cape Town –The government on it has for years failed to properly regulate municipal sewage works,many of which are discharging untreated or only partially-treated human waste into rivers around the country.
“The regulation function was to some extent neglected,”water affairs acting chief director of regulations Helgard Muller told members of Parliament’s water affairs portfolio committee.
“Let me admit,I think that immediately after 1994,and for some years,this function was not getting the right attention…We had to prioritise due to limited resources,”he said.
Muller’s admission comes a fortnight after the release of his department’s Green Drop Report,which assessed 449 of the country’s 852 waste water treatment plants.
It found only 32 of them qualified for so-called Green Drop status,broadly equivalent to them complying with international standards.
Further,it found that “the bulk of the (sewage) plants can be described as poor to non-functional”,implying that hundreds of millions of litres of inadequately-treated sewage was being illegally discharged each day,mainly by small town municipalities.
R23bn –the amount Water Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica says she needs to patch up the country’s collapsing sewage works –was enough.
Democratic Alliance MP Annette Lovemore said the Western Cape alone required R8bn to solve its waste water problems.
“The Western Cape is by far one of the better-performing provinces,so R23bn for the country –I wonder if this is not a serious under-estimation,”she said.
South Africa’s extensive network of sewage treatments plants,pipe networks and pump stations treats about 7.5bn litres of waste water a day.
