Drought-stricken municipalities in the Eastern Cape are on standby to start rolling out their water conservation plans as soon as National Treasury starts allocating reserve funds for the disaster in the provinces. This follows Co-operative Governance Minister Dr Zweli Mkhize’s announcement that the drought has been declared a national disaster.
The Jeffrey’s Bay-based and Grahamstown-based Makana municipalities are facing a possibility of Day Zero in June while Nelson Mandela Bay, which supplies water to Kouga one of its main dams, has dropped to 12%.
The province has requested R7.7 billion from Treasury to deal with the drought.
“Jeffrey’s Bay, it’s got its own water field; Kraaifontein, Humansdorp is got its (sic) own water field. St Francis gets its bulk water from the Churchhill pipeline, but there is a borehole or two that we can use. We’ve got a system where they link. We’ve got a system where they can support us if we run dry. So, to link all our systems with that of the Gamtoos valley, we need to interlink our bulk services infrastructure and that is going to cost us in a vicinity of R155 million, lots of money but it is going to be worthwhile in the end,” says Kouga Mayor Elza van Lingen.
Nelson Mandela Bay Mayor, Athol Trollip says access to the disaster reserve funds will increase the capacity of the Metro’s water treatment plants.
“The empowering thing about that is that it will allow the release of funds to make sure we don’t run out of water in the major metropolitans. It allows for us to procure without going through a laborous procurement process. So, what we need now we can procure now like water treatment plant, a biological water treatment plant for the water that we can extract, put off the Ekouga well, subterranean area that would take years but now we can fast track that and I am pleased.”
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