The eThekwini Municipality is under significant strain as it grapples with critical water supply and municipal infrastructure challenges, necessitating a new strategy.
On Wednesday, eThekwini Municipality deputy head of engineering and data services Simon Scruton was the guest speaker at the Consulting Engineers South Africa, KwaZulu-Natal Branch Function, where he discussed eThekwini’s Water and Sanitation Strategy. The strategy focuses on 13 key areas of the water business.
Scruton admitted that eThekwini has water challenges.
“The bad news is we’ve underspent on our CapEx (capital expenditure) and we’ve also overspent on OpEx (operational expenditure), we need both of those to go up by a factor of two to two and a half times that they’re currently at,” Scruton said.
He said bulk surface water is becoming scarce and expensive.
On the eThekwini Water and Sanitation Turnaround Strategy (TAS), Scruton said they had their strategy approved, which focuses on 13 key areas.
He said their water woes are linked main losses, connection leaks, and in the traditional areas.
“So if you have to compartmentalise it, that’s where the issues sit,” Scruton said.
The municipality’s non-revenue water (NRW) target for the next three years is to lower non-revenue water from 58% to 45%.
“We twinned with the Department of Water and Sanitation. They created a platform called PeWG, which is the Presidential eThekwini Working Group. That is looking at several areas of the metro business and putting that together and bringing other stakeholders on the same platform, together with business. So there’s sharing and transparency,” Scruton explained.
“We took what we were doing and reported this on the PeWG platform. We started off with 128 goals. We actually expanded them to 214, and to date, we’re sitting at approximately 22% complete.”
Scruton said this is monitored and they meet every week or second week with the director-general.
Touching on some of TAS’s achievements, Scruton said: “We signed a bulk water agreement with uMkhomazi Dam. This was delayed by environmental issues, programmatic issues and then funding issues because they didn't do the model properly and they wanted to pass full costs on to the consumer, which was almost double the water tariff. So we threw it back. Unfortunately, we got half of the project funded by national.”
“We’re reducing our backlogs, we’re dealing with some of the very big basic issues where people don't have vehicles or adequate vehicles.”
Scruton said eThekwini mayor Cyril Xaba is leading from the front and has adopted the strategy wholeheartedly.
He said there is a need to get behind the strategy wholeheartedly because it was their solution to create positive change throughout their environment.
Scruton said according to the Division of Revenue Bill 2025, R20 billion is being dispersed to the eight Metros that perform and a Metros’ ability to access their allocations will be based on an independent assessment of them meeting performance targets in their approved performance improvement action plans.
“Our initial thrust is looking at the efficiencies. A lot of money will be spent on metering programmes, response to leaks, giving our staff the vehicles, the tools, the materials, etc. that they need to do the job,” Scruton said.
He said what happens next is that EXCO and council’s approval of minimum commitments in May, then submission of documentation to National Treasury along with the supporting plan (performance improvement action plan) in June and lastly, the release of the performance-based grant in September.