Carolina’s polluted water highlights growing problem in SA (Business Day)

WHEN Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa meets Power Mndebele, a South African Communist Party organiser in Carolina, she meets a young man who is shaking with anger. About 17000 people live in the mining and farming community of Carolina, Mpumalanga, and they have not had drinkable water since mid-January, when seepage from mines poisoned the town’s water supply.

As the minister moved towards the town’s municipal offices on Friday, Mr Mndebele asks: "Has she come to see the municipality, or the community?" Ms Molewa tells townspeople and the media that fixing Carolina’s water problem would cost more than R200m and take more than a year.

 

She says the Department of Health has confirmed no deaths related to the water’s contamination and that about R6m would be spent immediately to bring drinkable water to the town and to improve its water treatment facility. The town already has plans to improve the facility, but the expense means it will take three years and is "at design stage", says Kgotso Motloung, the mayor of the Gert Sibande district. Ms Molewa stops him in his tracks. "We have to fast-track it because of the crisis," she says. Even this will take longer than a year, she says, adding there is R3m in state funds immediately available to get on with the job.

 

Carolina’s problem is one that looms across SA as a focus on broadening access to water services has left the country with an annual water infrastructure maintenance backlog, which water analyst Richard Holden has calculated at R2,66bn. Carolina’s water treatment facility does not have the capacity to deal with polluted water. It can only ensure clean water meets health requirements. But the area is rich in coal, and the notoriously understaffed Department of Water Affairs is still battling a backlog in the transfer of water use rights granted under defunct legislation to "new-order" water use rights.

 

Businesses, including mines, have been allowed to continue work while filing applications for new water use rights. Across SA 69 mines were operating without water use licences Ms Molewa told Parliament in answer to a question posed by Democratic Alliance water and environment spokesman Gareth Morgan. Of these, the most (23) were in Mpumalanga, while 17 were in Gauteng, 12 in KwaZulu-Natal and seven in North West. Work to process 47 applications was continuing.

 

Earlier this year, Lawyers for Human Rights and the Centre for Environmental Rights wrote to Ms Molewa on behalf of 18 organisations urging her to address this problem. It is a criminal offence to operate a mine without a proper water use licence, the two civil society organisations said. Prosecution, however, has been limited. In what was hailed as the "end of an era", the Department of Water Affairs laid charges against a mine in Mpumalanga’s Ermelo area last year. The matter is not concluded. In addition to mines operating without water use licences, and mines that have the requisite licences flouting rules, SA has thousands of abandoned mines. The Council for Geoscience says there were 5906 of these in 2008, many of which were responsible for pollution from burning workings, noxious dust and acid mine water.

 

In Carolina on Friday, Ms Molewa says she had asked the Department of Mineral Resources for a list of abandoned mines, and ideas on "how to work together" so that a community's drinkable water is not again compromised.

 

SA faces a big water problem. It is a water scarce country — annual rainfall is half the global average — and by 2005 at least 95% of SA’s fresh water was already allocated. Acid mine drainage has already poisoned water courses in the old gold mining area of the West Rand, and threatens the water sources of the Witwatersrand’s central and eastern basins.

 

The Trans-Caledon Tunnel Authority, a state-owned enterprise that has been tasked with sorting out this problem, says it will take R1bn to fix this properly. The government has set aside just under half that. "Now R200m is needed to secure the water supply for 17000 people (in Carolina). What’s the chances?" says Federation for a Sustainable Environment director Koos Prinsloo, who farms in the nearby Belfast district. Ms Molewa has promised to find the money.

 

In the meantime, queues at water stations in Carolina are long. Standing in one is Mirriam Simelane, who must collect four 20l drums every two days. "It's far for us to come, but the water from the tap is bad," she says.

 

 

Sue Blaine