The Democratic Alliance (DA) will intensify our monitoring of the Kimberley water shutdown, scheduled to start this evening up until Sunday, after which we will push for Sol Plaatje to appoint experts to help save the city from drowning in its own water and sewerage leaks.
The city is losing as much as 64% of its water to leaks, a large majority of which are pushing into the lake that flooded the R31. The municipality is also not managing to keep up with ever sprouting water leaks in and around the city. In March, the municipality addressed an average of only 74 out of 475 potable water complaints and in April, an average of 144 out of 1 085 potable water complaints.
It is clear that Sol Plaatje is losing the war on leaks and that the city’s pipelines are in desperate need of repairs.
This weekend, the DA will therefore be doing everything in our capacity to ensure that residents get through the shutdown and that they stay well informed about developments. We will be on the ground, helping communities that are without water to get access. I will further personally be checking on the physical repair work.
After we get through this weekend, the DA will turn our focus towards getting Sol Plaatje to tackle the root cause of its failure to maintain the city’s water infrastructure.
Priority must be placed on addressing the critical lack of available expertise to oversee Kimberley’s water and sewerage infrastructure. After all, it cannot be that the biggest municipality in the Northern Cape employs only one engineer, who is a road engineer.
We will therefore push Sol Plaatje to appointment a team of engineers because, without this expertise, ongoing ad hoc and emergency repairs will continue to be temporary solutions to a chronic problem.
We will also take it upon ourselves to ask COGHTSA MEC, Bentley Vass, to help the municipality to get assistance from the Municipal Infrastructure Support Agency (MISA) to support Sol Plaatje with the operation and maintenance of municipal infrastructure.
With the right people guiding the process, we can close the tap on leaks.