The Democratic Alliance (DA) has laid a criminal charge against Kai !Garib municipality for its ongoing failure to respond to the water related needs of the community. This comes after the DA submitted a memorandum on water demands to the municipality in February, which failed to elicit a response.
For the past year, water challenges in Kakamas and Keimoes have become increasingly disruptive to the local community. Residents have been struggling with a lack of water for six consecutive months. Water is intermittently turned on and off, with some people having no water in their taps at all. This has been aggravated by extremely hot weather conditions.
Despite the visibly deteriorating water situation, no significant action has been taken in respect of the maintenance and upgrading of Kai !Garib’s water systems, other than the municipality entering into contracts for the distribution of water via tankers.
A number of DA-led oversight inspections to water infrastructure sites in the area have revealed broken, dilapidated and outdated water infrastructure.
In Keimoes, water flow regulators are not properly functioning and therefore rinsing of the filters often causes water to run down the street due to failure to isolate water flow. The area in which the emergency pump is located is overgrown and unsafe, preventing the personnel from turning the pump on and off, especially during loadshedding and at night. The water automation system for measuring water levels at the reservoir is broken and staff have to climb up and down to monitor the water levels. In addition, the absence of a standard measure of water quality and record keeping of the water test results, renders the dosing of water with chemicals as questionable.
Kai !Garib’s dilapidated infrastructure and inadequate service delivery is the effect of longstanding, internal management failures and the water crisis demonstrates the desperate need for effective asset management in the municipality.
While the municipality failed to timeously submit its financial statements to the Auditor General (AG) for the past two consecutive years, the last AG Report for 2019/2020 saw the municipality receiving a disclaimer opinion based, amongst other things, on poor management of financial and infrastructure assets, as well as the asset register.
Section 173 (1) (a) (i) of the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA) states that the accounting officer of a municipality can be held criminally liable if he deliberately or, in a grossly negligent way, fails to maintain a management, accounting and information system that accounts for the assets and liabilities of the municipality.
It is for this reason that the DA laid a criminal charge (CAS number: 153/03/2024) in respect of violations of the MFMA. Allocating budgets for infrastructural development, while ignoring the underlying and unresolved asset maintenance issues, is highly unlikely to improve municipal performance.
The DA will keep fighting for Kai !Garib residents’ right to a sustainable and clean water supply. Ultimately, it is only the DA that can rescue the province from a growing number of municipal-induced water crises.