Drought and Water Scarcity: media briefing by Inter-Ministerial Committee on Drought

Drought and Water Scarcity: media briefing by Inter-Ministerial Committee on Drought on the 13 November 2015

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Question and Answer

Briefing Secretary: Thank you very much Ministers. At this point we will take a few questions. We will be able to give you the PowerPoint presentations together with the statement immediately after the briefing. Are there any questions, maybe on issues members of the media would like clarification on? I can start with Cape Town. Is there any question from Cape Town?

Paul Vecchiatto from Bloomberg Business: Good morning Ministers. Minister Mokonyane said the Vaal dam was 84% full, but according to Rand Water’s website the dam is actually at 53.5%. This was updated two days ago. Could you explain this difference? Secondly, you made no mention of the Acid Mine Drainage issue. A lot of that water was supposed to be cleaned. Is any consideration being given to that to help mitigate the water shortage? A question of clarity: you said that 173 water schemes out of 1 681 servicing 2,8 million households or 18% of the population. Is that the 173 water schemes or the total number of water schemes? Thank you.

Sunday Times Journalist: Thank you. A general point to start off with: I was rather astounded at the way in which we were spoken down to by these Ministers with the exception of Mister Nkwinti and the way in which all sorts of temperatures and climates and external factors were being blamed and very little responsibility was taken by government. From there, one thing that can be done for commercial farmers is surely to look at guarantees or soft loans. What is being done in that regard? Secondly, the upkeep of infrastructure has been an issue under discussion for many, many years and which many local authorities have glibly denied. What is being done to be stricter on the upkeep of infrastructure from government’s side? Thirdly, you say that these five provinces have been declared disaster areas. Have these disaster areas been gazetted? In the fourth place, the Sterkfontein Dam basically consists of water being pumped up from KZN to service Gauteng. What impact does this have on KZN? Finally, Minister Mokonyane, I thought you came close to doing what Minister Gordhan said that you should not and politicising issues by stating that in the Johannesburg Metro the problem lay in the Northern Suburbs and not in Soweto; can we have the relevant numbers?

Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CGTA) Pravin Gordhan: I think that the way the [previous] question has been framed is rather regrettable. Firstly, this gentleman accuses us of speaking down to people. We have not. I have not and none of my colleagues have. I want to express my strong objection to your choice of words. Secondly, politicising. We are stating facts. We are not pointing fingers at anybody. Whoever has the capacity to reduce the amount of water they are using should use that capacity to reduce the water. This is an appeal, as I have said from the beginning, to work as one South African team. It looks like this journalist wants government to admit that we did everything wrong. In the process, he is actually politicising this exchange, which is about facts and what is going on in the country. It is not about pointing fingers and blaming people but rather about asking everyone to cooperate in order to solve the problems that we have. We will come back to the questions.

Briefing Secretary: Let us take the rest of the journalists from Cape Town.

Joylene van Wyk: How much of the R96.6 million drought relief in KZN, will be going to farmers? As initially, the farmers were not included in that R300 and something million. Also, on the gazetting issue, I understand that KZN needs to declare the drought again because farmers were not initially included and it also needs to be re-gazetted. My last question: especially now with the dams in the major crop areas being very low, how close are we to a total shutdown or putting a restriction on irrigation schemes? Thank you.

Khulekani Magubane from Business Day: Thank you. First of all I wanted to ask Minister Mokonyane if there is a figure on how much water is needed to replenish the most troubled provinces? Hopefully we can get a rough figure on that. And secondly, from Minister Zokwana, for clarity on the 17% quarter on quarter contraction which was mentioned. What are the figures there?

Briefing Secretary: Thank you. Over to you Minister.

Minister Gordhan: I will ask Mr Ken Terry, Head of Disaster Management, COGTA, to explain the gazetting story so that we can clear that up for you.

Minister of Water and Sanitation Nomvula Mokonyane: Thank you for the questions. The Vaal River, just to explain. The 80% relates to the Vaal River system of which the Vaal dam is one of the dams in the system. Secondly, The Sterkfontein dam has a capacity 2 660 million cubic metres. We transfer a maximum of 600 million cubic metres per year. In the current hydrological cycle, we have transferred 300 million cubic metres. This is the situation now.

I did refer to acid mine drainage. As of today, there are three: the Central Basin, the Western Basin, and the Eastern Basin, which is under construction. We have moved beyond short-term emergency interventions. We are now ready with the implementation. We are in discussion with National Treasury on the funding model. Together with the Trans-Caledon Tunnel Authority (TCTA), which is one of the agencies that did the consultation with Rand Water, we are now looking at the long-term which is something we have committed to do so that we can be in a position to deal with demand for Gauteng industry and households. 

I would ask Trevor Balzer to talk on the water needed to replenish. In terms of our own water infrastructure systems, we do have sufficient water. The problem is the pumping to the end user or reticulation due to the high heat that we are now faced with. With your permission, Trevor will give the detail in that regard. The issue around the schemes: my comment was very clear in that the drought currently affects 173 schemes only. Those are the ones affected. Storage is an issue. We now have to harvest the water from other schemes and transfer the water to those areas with high need. That can only be done through water storage and water tinkering systems. The development of water storage has been good because there is minimal water loss when you create water storage.

We are now looking at innovation around emergency pipes to move water from one side to another; this is what is being considered to deal with the augmentation as we see now in KZN. The resources that have been provided were the resources that help in terms of water security in KZN. Ministers Zokwana and Nkwinti have spoken about the interventions that have been put in place with regards to relief for farmers. We were looking at augmenting infrastructure and water security and dealing with demand management. The resources you refer to went towards that. In return, farmers are beneficiaries of this. We have a multi-disciplinary team working on this.

Minister of Environmental Affairs Edna Molewa: Thank you. Very briefly, I want to touch on the question as to how much would be allocated as drought relief for farmers; Minister Zokwana will also touch on this. As South Africans we need to look at support to farmers in another way. A whole other burden on farmers is the expenditures on fire. El Nino has caused farmers to experience veld fires on an ongoing basis. We may fight as many as 3 000 fires this year. There is a budget to help farmers with this, both small and commercial, of R528 million, just in this financial year. This shows support for farmers. There is also money for farmers for working on land. There are two amounts. The first amount is R93 million for ecosystems, in other words ensuring that the farming community does not continue to experience problems in relation to water shortages and other usages. This money is allocated and budgeted for 2015/16 for working on the ecosystem. For working on the land from our side, R27 million has been allocated. Work on fires has had R1,3 billion allocated for this programme to assist and support our farmers. All these are supporting ecosystems and farmers. All this money is over and above Direct Rand through agriculture.

Minister Gordhan: I will ask Mr Balzer to go first, then Mr Terry on the gazetting story.

Mr Trevor Balzer, Department of Water and Sanitation: Thank you Minister. To respond and add to previous answers, when we talk of augmenting systems we move water from dams which have reasonably high water supply to dams that are dangerously low. The Vaal river system takes a number of years to respond even after a wet season. We annually assess system capacity. We account for whether there has been a hydrological or meteorological drought.

Minister Gordhan: Please speak simple English.

Mr Balzer: I apologise. I thought everyone had heard the term hydrological because the Minister used it earlier. The hydrological season is from 1 October to the end of September of the next year. After the system has received its summer rainfall, we analyse the system to test for drought conditions, precipitation indexes, etc. We would then run a model to see in the worst-case scenario how we will manage the Vaal river system. On the basis of this year’s analysis, we do not foresee significant restrictions before 2019. In order to reach that date, we did transfer at the beginning of this season 300 million cubic metres of water from the upper system through a number of dams up until the Kilburn dam where we then use Eskom to help us move the water over the mountain into the Sterkfontein dam. The Sterkfontein dam is larger and thus evaporation at Sterkfontein is not as bad as at the wide and shallow Vaal dam. If one looks at the Vaal dam, you might see that it drops and fluctuates every week.

As for other transfers, we have transferred 8 million litres of water per day into the Hazelmere dam to stabilise the flow. We have kept flow above twenty five percent there and maintained that level. We will have to review this in the coming week because some rivers are drying up; we may need to increase the levels of restrictions on rivers. We have also done transfers into the Goedertrouw dam and it has been stabilised. I will not go into all dams because these three examples illustrate reservoir management in the country. There are 263 major dams in the country. We assess the Western Cape in November because it is a winter rainfall area. Winter rainfall dams have a much quicker recovery period. Those numbers will come out soon; there may be a need for some restrictions in the Western Cape.

Mr Terry: Four provinces: KZN, Free State, North West, and Limpopo have gazetted disasters. Mpumalanga has declared disaster and is finishing up the process of gazetting next week. KZN is busy with a process of re-classification but they have not yet finalised this.

Minister Zokwana: Thank you. I have said that we have met with the banks and the report we have received from the commercial farmers to the President of Agri-SA is that they are happy with the work we are doing in trying to create a dialogue in which soft loans can be given to farmers for the losses they have made. I concur with Minister Molewa to say that government is spending much money to help farmers. There will be a meeting very soon between Agri-SA and the DG. They will work to quantify the losses, though we know that grains have been affected. As for the 17% contraction, we received these figures from Stats-SA, but the Department can confirm that the total area planted has decreased from 2,7 to 2,5 million hectares in 2015 due to drought.

Minister Gordhan: I will address infrastructure. In some areas infrastructure is thirty to fifty years old. Some assistance is required. New infrastructure will also be necessary. We are encouraging municipalities to set aside more money for maintenance. Secondly, we are looking at efficient ways of implementing bulk infrastructure. Thirdly, we are trying to find a way of leveraging the municipal infrastructure grant with other funding from outside government so that bigger projects can in fact be managed and be managed quicker. Our emphasis with municipalities is going to shift to operational competency. Government will be doing on the ground inspections.

In Gauteng for example, we want operational cohesion through the establishment of a joint centre to bolster current capacities. They will meet every morning. As Mr Balzer showed, the water system is very dynamic. You can also shift water within a city in order to supplement certain challenged areas. Mayor Tau is here and he will explain that, in certain parts of our town, higher lying areas have difficulties due to pressure issues. We want municipalities to provide clear schedules on supply interruption. The demand side is a key. More needs to be done to raise collective consciousness and to cause every South African to contribute. Businesses should give prizes for innovative ideas. Illegal connections are also a problem, which is why the War on Leaks programme was launched. We have asked mayors to pay attention to droughts in a letter sent last night. The letter asked mayors to report back within a week to report things like leaks. We are going to put pressure on municipalities to react quickly to problems. They must update infrastructure, inform the public, and mitigate risks.

Mayor Parks Tau of Johannesburg: Gauteng is working with Rand Water on supply and demand equalisation and to increase storage. We want to increase supplier capacity to store water. We have a collective responsibility to the Gauteng area as a whole to the extent that Rand Water is the main supplier. 46% of the water supplied to households is currently used for gardening, particularly due to heat waves and drought. Reducing this will help Gauteng. We have to encourage people to change their behaviour. We do not want to police people or reduce pressure or cut off the system. Depending on the system in the next few days, decisions will be necessary. We are working with communities. As for utilising acid mine drainage water, testing on a potential technology to do this has been positive in Johannesburg. We need to identify a source for this water and have these tests approved through the due processes.

Briefing Secretary: We have had an extensive briefing already. We will only take a few more questions.

A Journalist from African News Agency: Minister Mokonyane, I know there have been efforts to stop the leaks, but do you have a figure for the amount of water lost due to leakages as of now?

A Journalist from the Pretoria News: I would like to raise a social issue. There is a summer extravaganza event coming up starting in Cape Town next month called “Slide the City”. There will be fifteen events up until February using 40 000 litres per day. Though the company claims that the water will be recycled, some find this distasteful due to the drought situation. The city of Tshwane has indicated that they could pull out in the interest of the city. What is your view?

A Journalist from Business Day TV: You touched briefly on efforts regarding leakages. Do you have any figures on how many people are using the leaks hotline? How many reports have come in and are being addressed?

Theresa Taylor from eNCA: Minister Molewa, you spoke about climate issues and how El Nino will affect us throughout the summer, but how long will the drought last? My understanding is that it is not just El Nino causing it. What are the latest figures that you have?

Leanne George, News Media 24: Minister Mokonyane, we understand that Rand Water has reached its capacity for supplying the Tshwane metro from the Vaal system and that opposition parties in the Tshwane metro say they will only be able to get more water in 2023 once the Lesotho Highlands Scheme next phase has been finished. Please comment.

Briefing Secretary: Over to you Ministers.

A representative from Rand Water: Under normal circumstances, we do not have a problem with supply in Tshwane. The important thing here is the design and how our hydraulic system works. We first start from the same system to supply Johannesburg and then parts of it go to Tshwane. Following the Ministers’ suggestions for system stabilisation would solve the current problem. The figure you refer to is based on the next phase of augmentation. Rand Water has plans currently targeted for March 2016 that we are trying to achieve by the end of January because of the current crisis. We are looking at putting other 200 Mega litres in the system. In early 2017, we will look at another 300 Mega litres and then another 300 Mega litres nine months later to have increased capacity by 1000 Mega litres by 2018. The current issues arise from the excess in demand. We are going to have to make very serious decisions in the short term as Ministers have alluded to. The system can cater for everyone depending on how we use it.

Minister Mokonyane:  Water leaks are partly caused by illegal connections. We are losing almost R7 billion Rands worth of water. We are working with municipalities to improve infrastructure and lay new pipes. We are removing asbestos pipes. We give support to municipalities who lack capacity. As for the Summer Slide extravaganza, we have to make choices as a country. There have been discussions among provinces and in the Department. We can have recreation but we have to make hard choices. Recycled water would be a factor considered. There must be adaptation under drought conditions. 

Minister Molewa: the South African Weather Service (SAWS) works to predict El Nino. The long-term prediction only goes six months. Up until the end of summer we will have drought, but after that we will do further predictions. We cannot predict next July yet. Other influences cause El Nino, like the warming of the oceans, ocean winds, and other variables. Predictions are susceptible to these and other variables. We have been told that there will be sporadic rain especially in the eastern part of the country. It may not be adequate. Thunder is also a possibility. Many scientists have been looking at lightning; we are the country with the highest number of deaths from lightning. These issues also bring in play the international level. We are campaigning for international response for climate change. Carbon emissions exacerbate climate change and El Nino. We need to finalise the agreement that everyone in the world must act on carbon emissions. It is important even if it is not implemented until 2020. 159 countries have willingly submitted their national contributions out of 194. We are at about 2,7 degrees Celsius, which is very high.

Minister Gordhan: We need to operate on a six-month window. The global picture includes wider issues that we must account for. Let me re-emphasise that we will partner with all sectors of South Africa to tackle this as a South African team. We need to start encouraging people to make personal, business, and technology adaptations that will enable us to save water and find new sources of water. Much of this is possible but more awareness is necessary. At the same time, we will work with municipalities to ensure that they have the correct bylaws and that they are well advertised.

Briefing Secretary: We have come to the end of the briefing.