eThekwini Municipality's ability to deliver water is under threat due to severe infrastructure damage caused by vandalism and theft.
Image: File: Oupa Mokoena / Independent Newspapers
The ability of the eThekwini Municipality to deliver water to its residents is under serious threat due to damage and sabotage of its infrastructure.
The damage to the municipal infrastructure includes sabotage, vandalism, and theft. The issue of deliberate vandalism of infrastructure came to the fore recently following a payment dispute between city contractors and the municipality.
A new invoice system, where contractors have to submit a report of the work done along with invoices, has been blamed for the payment delays.
The city provided details of the damage to date in a statement. It said: "The extent of the damage to municipal water infrastructure is severe and widespread. The municipality is experiencing significant levels of vandalism, theft, and destruction across critical assets and components.
"The damage affects a wide range of infrastructure components, including Pressure Reducing Valves (PRVs) and their internal components, damage to chambers, kiosks, valves, reservoir sites, fencing, and the theft of essential operational equipment such as control panels and telemetry monitoring systems. These incidents are contributing to substantial unplanned expenditure, resulting in fruitless and irregular costs that place pressure on municipal finances.
Monitoring equipment is causing pressure fluctuations within the network, which further increases water losses and reduces system efficiency."
The City said the unauthorised interference with municipal infrastructure disrupts the hydraulic balance of the water network, resulting in pressure fluctuations across the system, an increased frequency of downstream pipe bursts, higher levels of non-revenue water losses, and inconsistent or inadequate water supply to consumers. The municipality said the vandalism of municipal infrastructure remains a long-standing challenge within the municipality.
IFP councillor and chairperson of the Trading Services Committee Mdu Nkosi described the situation as unacceptable and destructive. "We do not know how much it will cost to repair that damage at the moment, but we can state that it will cost a lot of money."
Nkosi said the strike by contractors who have not been paid for work is suspected to be the reason behind the damage. "While I understand the frustration of those that have not been paid, the vandalism of city infrastructure is intolerable as it has real consequences for the public. If they open the pipes and let the water leak into the ground, it means someone is not getting the water because the water is flowing onto the ground, damaging the city infrastructure, and the expectation to continue doing business with the same city is improper."
Nkosi urged for the situation of non-payment of contractors to be addressed and for those that have submitted invoices to be paid quickly. The contractors have previously denied involvement in damaging municipal infrastructure.
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