By Geoff Embling
For the past seven years, ongoing water outages in Makana Municipality have become more and more frequent. These water outages could have been avoided if Makana Municipality’s council and administration took more of an interest in the James Kleynhans Water Treatment Works (JKWTW) upgrades. The upgrades should have cost roughly R100 million and were meant to be completed by 2017, but to date, the cost has ballooned more than four-fold, and the upgrades are not yet completed.
According to GroundUp News, “the water service utility’s stakeholder manager Amanda Skritch, on 7 April, said the completion date has been pushed to the end of June”. When hearing statements such as this, the public should know that the implementing agent, Amatola Water, has missed so many deadlines that it has become tiresome to count them, and Amatola’s increasingly frequent promises are like water off a duck’s back.
On 31 August 2023, Amatola published a great piece of fiction, proclaiming that it had reached its target of 20 million litres of bulk water production per day. Afterwards, Amatola admitted that it would reach this goal in April 2024. Then April came and went, and the new deadline is now June 2024. Amatola has missed four deadlines of completion over the past year alone!
The old filter beds will not be re-used, and eight new filter beds are required for producing 20 million litres of water per day. These upgrades have now been shifted to the next phase of the project, and the tender has allegedly not yet been put out for this phase. It is therefore not clear how the project will be completed by the end of June 2024.
What is clear, though, is that the project would have been completed a long time ago if Makana’s council and administration had shown an active interest in the proceedings. The council and the infrastructure portfolio have never been updated on the specifics of the upgrades, or the reasons behind the increased cost. The council is told, from time to time, that JKWTW will be finished by such and such a date, only to be told several months later that there has been a delay. To learn anything about the specifics of the project, such as filter beds, increasing cost, the filter building, control panels, pumps etc., one must visit the site and talk to external people.
Makana should have representatives sitting at all the meetings between DWS, Amatola Water, Bosch Projects and contractors, and these representatives should feed back to the municipality. Either Makana knows what is going on but doesn’t inform council or the public, because it wants to see this “cash cow” of a project being delayed whilst more funding is pumped in, or, it really doesn’t know what is going on between DWS, Amatola, Bosch and contractors, and it just doesn’t care whether Makana’s residents get regular water or not.
Either way, it is shocking to let a hundred thousand residents continually suffer from water outages. Water outages could have been averted as far back as 2017 if Makana Municipality had a ruling party in council which had paid close attention and been actively involved with the James Kleynhans Water Treatment Works upgrades.
