Durban - Desalination is the future for South Africa’s coastal cities and it’s soon going to be within reach.
“The Saudis are driving the price of the technology down. It was 33 US cents a litre to produce and now it’s 20. That’s cheaper than treating polluted (river) water,” water infrastructure expert Anthony Turton told the Independent on Saturday.
He was speaking ahead of World Water Day, which takes place on Tuesday.
“I cannot see the future without desalination on a huge scale,” said Turton.
“All the coastal cities, from Richards Bay to Cape Town, are fundamentally water constrained and will not be able to get their water from their rivers. It is sucked up by inland water users.”
Turton called the state of water infrastructure in South Africa “absolutely abysmal”.
He added that the country’s rivers were now far worse than they were in 1998, when the National Water Act was promulgated.
Turton said that while the Act makes it punishable to impede the flow of a river, he had seen it selectively applied in an increasingly corrupt manner.
“Legislatively we have failed. It’s alarming that we are seeing selective prosecution of people.”
He said legally authorised sand mines were being closed when their operators were not willing to pay bribes, while illegal sand miners operated with impunity.
“If we are ever to steer our way out of the morass we find ourselves in, we have to have application of the National Water Act without fear or favour,” said Turton.
On the breakdown of many sewerage works across the country, he said that of the 5 billion litres of waste water discharged every day, only about a billion was treated “to some reasonable standard”.
Again, municipalities were not prosecuted in spite of being expected to discharge water only to a certain standard.
“It comes down to the co-operative governance clause in our constitution,” he said, explaining that this was why the Department of Water and Sanitation could not intervene when a municipal waste water system had failed.
“That’s absurd. It undermines the credibility of the Department of Water and Sanitation as a credible regulator.”
Turton stressed the need for an independent regulator.
“We have been lobbying for that and there has been some indication of movement in that direction.”
Turton also said that he had been encouraged by new Water and Sanitation Minister Senzo Mchunu, who asked the CEO of Bloemfontein Water to contact him after Turton had mentioned the Free State capital’s water issues during a television news interview.
“He was reaching out. It wasn’t confrontational,” said Turton, adding that Mchunu appeared to want to get water affairs working.
Turton added that water resources had been abused with decomposed antibodies, sewage and ARVs, bombarding marine life. He warned this could lead to resistant pathogens coming about.
Also speaking ahead of World Water Day, Shami Harichunder of Umgeni Water, which supplies drinking water to seven KZN municipalities including the largest cities, said two huge projects were under way to provide for future water needs.
Both are on the Mkomazi River, the larger of the two being in the Midlands and the other closer to the coast, costing R40 billion.
The larger is expected to take eight years to complete and will feed the western parts of eThekwini while the smaller project will take five years and feed the southern parts of eThekwini as well as the northern tip of Ugu Municipality.
The Independent on Saturday