The other day I mentioned we had no water and that in our area we had water trucks offering relief to those that needed water. When I saw this story with regard to the Ethekwini Municipality (Durban) I had to read up some more to understand the problems.
Durban is the third largest metropolitan area in South Africa by population and has been having a water crisis which is actually an understatement. The ageing infrastructure with broken pipes due to neglect or intentional vandalism has seen the water loss rise from 49% in 2021 to a now gob smacking 65%. For every liter of water you receive via a tap the municipality has lost 650ml. The estimated amount of water being lost monthly is 21 billion liters of water as of June this year.
The water losses has a value of around R3.2 billion each year which is slightly more than $200 million. The interesting part is the municipality was paying via tenders for water tankers R106 million in 2021 and last year R816 million.
The fleet of 361 Mercedes Alto water tankers would cost roughly R800 million to purchase new and is a once off payment so no annual tender required. Over the last 5 years the infrastructure has deteriorated rapidly leaving the residents paying more for their utilities whilst receiving far less. This is a typical African story that is repeated over and over as nothing is ever repaired until it is broken due to little or no maintenance.
I know this all too well as over the last 10 years my Durban property has had so many burst pipes and this is all down to fluctuating water pressure and the water has to find a way out by picking the weakest pat of the pipes. We have had at least two burst pipes annually with the last one being in March this year. This has cost me a small fortune in water bills which are fractionally covered by the municipality insurances.
Since 2021 the municipality debtors bill has swelled from R16 billion till present at around R50 billion. The irregular expenditure by the municipality has also grown by nearly 500% sitting at R400 million per month. Irregular is another African term term for unaccountable or in normal terms stolen.
The tender entrepreneurs will not be happy the municipality has bought their own trucks because this is not how this game works. You would like to think instead of blowing all this money on a large fleet of trucks that they would actually start replacing the infrastructure so they do not need the fleet of trucks. That would be common sense, but I do agree with purchasing the fleet first and then doing the repair work afterwards.
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Why I say this is the infrastructure has deteriorated at such a rate due to tampering and vandalism by those who benefit from the water truck tenders. By removing them as direct beneficiaries there is no benefit to tampering with the infrastructure anymore. New pipes would have just been broken and nothing would ever improve due to the mafia style run tender business.
The budget for this and next year to repair and replace the infrastructure is at around R1.8 billion which is literally 4 months of irregular expenditure. This may improve things, but a well run city is never going to happen as then it reduces the opportunities of irregular spend.