“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.

Sonjica said yesterday the bill for refurbishing the plants could rise even higher, as the figure was an estimate. She said that while there was reason for concern at the parlous state of the country’s sewage treatment works, “we have not reached crisis levels”.

She briefed journalists at the Union Buildings at the release of the much-delayed Green Drop report, an assessment of how sewage treatment works are performing.  Poorly treated waste water pollutes land and rivers, posing problems for farmers, damage to eco- systems and health risks.  Water experts have expressed concern over deteriorating conditions at the plants, which treat just under 7 600 megalitres of waste water every day.

The report puts a capital replacement value of the country’s waste water treatment systems at R23bn – the amount Sonjica says she needs to deal with “hot spots”.

Her department’s acting chief director for water services and regulation, Leonardo Manus, said R12.6bn was needed for infrastructure, R1.4bn for operational expenditure – including hiring technicians, scientists and engineers – while R9.2bn was required for pump station networks and water reticulation infrastructure.  Sonjica said the R23bn was an estimate of the cost of dealing with problems only at the 50 percent of municipal treatment works assessed.

by Xolani Mbanjwa