People’s Water Forum: SA municipalities failing to provide water, sanitation

The People’s Water Forum wants government to declare a national disaster over the country’s persistent water challenges.

The forum, which is made up of several civil society groups, held a media briefing on Wednesday at Constitution Hill in Johannesburg.

This follows recent water outages in many parts of the city, which have seen some areas go for weeks without running water.

The People’s Water Forum said many affected communities in the city had reported having their water restored.

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However, the forum said this was a familiar pattern that had been happening over the last decade, where water comes and goes at different periods.

Forum chairperson Ferrial Adam said this was a countrywide issue and needed a much more sustainable solution.

Adam said: “We are saying if they declare it a national disaster — and it’s not a national disaster on climate, so it’s not the same as you’d expect in the Western Cape where they have a drought — it’s a national disaster on infrastructure. Most of our municipalities across the country are failing to provide water and sanitation services to people. When you have 70% of your waste water treatment works spewing sewage into your rivers and streams, that’s a disaster — because it then affects river system health. When half of our water drinking systems are not fit for drinking, that’s a disaster.”

While government has established a task team to look into the water crisis, it does not see the issue as rising to the level of a national disaster as it is fixable.

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