The parliamentary portfolio committee on water and sanitation has issued a scathing warning to the department, saying its ongoing failure to release water quality reports is illegal.
The water and sanitation department, which has failed to consistently release the report measuring the quality of the country’s water resources since 2014, appeared before the committee on Wednesday.
This means water users have in the past four years not had any assurances about the quality of water used. However, those in towns and cities are an exception, as municipalities have released such reports.
The “green drop” report is a status given to municipalities that comply with good wastewater discharge standards, while the “blue drop” report provides information on the quality of drinking water.
The portfolio committee said on Wednesday the department’s actions are illegal.
The committee hit out at “laxity” in the department, which is not fulfilling its obligation to release the report annually.
The committee said the negligence contributed directly to the water pollution in many rivers, mainly because “assessment mechanisms" are not being implemented”.
The Vaal River in Gauteng is one of the most prominent cases in which raw sewage has been flowing unabated directly into the river. Environmentalists and community members have unsuccessfully raised the alarm.,
Finance minister Tito Mboweni said the government will immediately reprioritise funds to deal with the crisis. He said he has sought engineering and other expertise from the army to resolve the crisis.
University of Cape Town’s Future Water Research Institute co-ordinator, Kirsty Carden, slammed the lack of transparency.
There have been long-standing concerns by academics and environmentalists about the status of wastewater treatment plants, which were in crisis when the “green drop” report was last released in 2013.
“This is the sort of information we should know…. The last green report was not good,” she said.
According to 2013 figures, 30%of water treatment works were in crisis on how they were being managed. “We know there are many at critical risk of failure,” she said.
Parliamentary committee chair Mlungisi Johnson said department officials are getting paid to “do nothing”.
“In January 2017, the department promised to deliver the report in October. We are now a year from that promised date yet the report is still not here. What the department is doing is illegal, because this laxity undermines the responsibility to ensure the quality of our water resource,” he said.
The department was instructed to produce a report detailing the quality of rivers and wastewater treatment infrastructure in 14 days.
Department spokesperson Sputnik Ratau told Business Day that they conducted partial blue drop assessments in 2015 and 2016.
He added that the reports were about more than just quality. “They include overall management of water and wastewater treatment plants,” he said.
The department has replaced the drop system with an Integrated Regulatory Information System, a web-based system where municipalities load data, according to Ratau.
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