An aerial view of the Durban City Hall building and gardens The Durban City Hall which serves as the seat of local government, the eThekwini Municipality. Questions have been raised about the budget to fix water outages. File Picture: Khaya Ngwenya Independent Newspapers
A call has been made for the re-prioritisation of the eThekwini Municipality’s budget to allocate funds to address the water challenges that have crippled parts of the Metro over recent weeks.
The DA in eThekwini, in a statement released yesterday, announced that it has filed a motion in council to request that the chief financial officer (CFO) investigate the feasibility of re-prioritising the budget to ensure that funds are allocated to the eThekwini Water and Sanitation (EWS) and electricity clusters.
However, the IFP has accused the DA of using the crisis for political grandstanding. IFP councillor Mdu Nkosi, who chairs the Trading Services cluster overseeing water and electricity services, said the DA’s actions were inappropriate given the seriousness of the water issue.
Parts of the eThekwini Municipality, particularly northern areas, especially oThongathi, have been severely affected by water outages.
Last month, The Mercury reported on a community meeting in oThongathi where residents expressed their concerns about significant water supply disruptions, notably following the April 2022 floods, which caused extensive damage to the Tongaat Water Treatment Works.
Despite repairs completed in October 2022, residents continue to experience intermittent water shortages.
In a statement to explain its motion, the DA said it had reliably learned that the municipality’s water department had exhausted its budget for water repairs.
“This has resulted in a halt to work by independent contractors, while the plumbers employed directly by the City can only attend to repairs during business hours. This situation has caused a massive backlog, with residents bearing the brunt of the inefficiency.
“The municipality is losing hundreds of thousands of rands every day due to these unaddressed leaks, while residents endure water shortages and poor service delivery. With over 50% of water (non-revenue water) in the City unaccounted for, one would expect that fixing water leaks would be a top priority to conserve resources. However, the current administration has failed to address this critical issue,” the DA said.
The motion said the “essential services units have been rendered dysfunctional, as they have exhausted their budgets, in certain departments”.
The motion calls for the executive committee to mandate the CFO to investigate the feasibility of reprioritisation of the budget in January 2025 and that savings be identified to allocate to the EWS and electricity clusters.
Speaking as the chairperson of the committee, Nkosi said it was improper for the DA to use the water crisis for political gain.
“The DA knows that Mayor Cyril Xaba is going to call a press briefing to address the issue and now they are filing this motion for the purposes of grandstanding.
“The water issue is a very serious matter; the ageing infrastructure is not a new issue; it’s an old problem. The mistake that we all (parties) made was that when the municipality had money, we did not move with speed to address the issue of ageing infrastructure. The water that we receive from uMngeni-uThukela Water Board is sufficient, but a lot of that water we lose through leaks.”
Nkosi said if it was true that the clusters had run out of funds, the CFO of the municipality, Dr Sandile Mnguni, must inform the mayor, who will then inform the executive committee.
Municipal Speaker Thabani Nyawose said he had not seen the DA’s motion which has to be processed by his office.