MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Water crisis in Makhanda is the tip of the iceberg

This week, students at Rhodes University joined residents of Makhanda and civic movements in a march to City Hall to demand that the Makana local Municipality find a short-term and permanent solution to the ongoing water crisis in the Eastern Cape town.

For more than a decade, the small town, formerly known as Grahamstown, has been in the grip of a devastating water insecurity crisis. I lived in Makhanda for five years between 2012 and 2017, as an undergraduate and honours geography student at Rhodes University. Back then, the main problem with the water was its poor quality that made it undrinkable.

Over the years, the crisis has gone from the water being undrinkable to being completely unavailable. By 2018, water-shedding had become the new normal, where water would be available for a few hours per day. Eventually, the hours became days and then days became a week.

The unreliability of water supply in Makhanda has resulted in the non-governmental organisation Gift of the Givers, providing a water tank to the town. Last month, a report by GroundUp showed the elderly and children pushing wheelbarrows and on donkey carts, collecting rationed water from the Gift of the Givers tank. The indignity of it is numbing.

Gift of the Givers has played an instrumental role in supplying water not only to Makhanda residents, but to many communities across the country. In some instances, the organisation has had to dig boreholes to ensure water supply to schools and hospitals.

While this must be commended, it does present a number of problems. Firstly, water deposits that are being accessed by some of the boreholes contain deadly bacteria. Studies conducted by the University of Venda and the Tshwane University of Technology as well as a 2020 study published by the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that groundwater used by public schools in the Limpopo Province contains bacteria including salmonella, shigella, campylobacteria and E. coli.

Secondly, the geological nature of coastal zones such as those in the Eastern Cape mean that water being extracted with boreholes may be replaced by saline water intrusion coming from the sea, through fissures in the rocks. This would contaminate the water in boreholes, making it undrinkable.

Beyond saline water intrusion, borehole water cannot be used for every form of consumption without purification treatment. This cannot be done directly from the source due to the possibility of contaminants. The water needs to be tested and a water purification system installed.

Government officials often cite prohibitive costs of such interventions and geography as the main factor for water challenges. While South Africa is a water-scarce country and has experienced very low rainfall in the last few years, there are other factors that are responsible for its water insecurity crisis.

One of these is the lack of maintenance of water infrastructure by the government. It is estimated that 70-million liters of treated, clean, drinkable water is lost daily as a result of the thousands of leaks that characterise the country’s water piping system.

Furthermore, resources that should be channeled towards the maintenance and building of water infrastructure are often lost to rampant corruption and maladministration in the state, as well as shoddy work being done by contracted companies.

The situation in Makhanda is beyond crisis point and is a microcosm of the overall water crisis in South Africa. It is critical that our country practices integrated water planning and management that ensures sustainable and equitable water access.

Furthermore, we must cultivate informed and engaged water citizens, and empower residents, government, businesses and NGOs to become water conscious. New water-saving technologies must also be developed in the agricultural and mining sectors in particular. Anything less than this moves the country closer towards the inevitable Day Zero.