Cape Town’s water supply is stable, but for how long?

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JEREMY MAGGS: For many Capetonians, the prospect of water restrictions brings back uncomfortable memories of that Day Zero crisis.

Now, with concerns growing about water supplies in parts of the Western Cape, new questions are being asked about just how prepared the province and its municipalities are for another prolonged dry spell.

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Cape Town has spent years promising a more resilient water system, but how much progress has actually been made, and could residents once again be facing severe restrictions?

In that respect, I’m going to talk to Dr Zahid Badroodien, who is Cape Town’s mayoral committee member (MMC) for water and sanitation. Dr Badroodien, welcome to you. So let me ask you bluntly, is the city facing another potential Day Zero?

ZAHID BADROODIEN: No, we are not. The simple reason for that is because our new water programme has made significant progress in terms of not only groundwater efforts, our alien invasive plant removal efforts, but about two weeks ago moving into the next phase of releasing the request for proposals on our Faure New Water Scheme (FNWS), which will see about 100 million litres of water coming online in about 2030.

Unfortunately, our desalination is delayed, but certainly not as a result of any planning failure on the city’s side.

This is simply as a result of the National Ports Authority, unfortunately throwing us a curveball.

JEREMY MAGGS: How secure, as we have this conversation, then, is the city’s water supply right now and what might trigger restrictions, given that we could be facing a very long, hot summer?

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ZAHID BADROODIEN: Water supply at the moment is stable. We have sufficient supply for the next summer season. Obviously, our dams fill up every winter, so between April, May and October, this particular winter season, which we’re still currently in, drier than usual.

This is why we are on alert at the moment, not only engaging with our own residents around responsible use, but also proactively reaching out to the neighbouring municipalities and trying to pull the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) in to try and bring other stakeholders into the conversation as well.

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And to say that, yes, our water supply is stable, but the city of Cape Town should not and must not go into restrictions alone.

We are one user of what we call the Western Cape water supply system. So even if our municipality implements restrictions, if the other municipalities who use the supply system don’t, what we try and do in our city will have very little impact on the overall dam volume.

JEREMY MAGGS: Why are you, interestingly, raising that issue? Is there concern that other municipalities might not be taking this seriously enough?

ZAHID BADROODIEN: We’ve engaged with them proactively, as I’ve shared. Other municipalities certainly have started to ramp up their own communication around water-saving behaviour, flagging with their residents the fact that we need to start using water responsibly and only for essential supply.

I believe from the engagements with our officials, the biggest concern at the moment is being shared by the agricultural sector, and the agricultural sector is a very large user of the dam water supply, obviously, for their activities on their various farms.

As we go into the summer season, you can imagine that a lot of the water that they will require is during this period.

So any restrictions that may be implemented as a whole and with DWS’s support will impact them, will have a financial impact on them, ultimately impact their ability to farm.

So there is that negotiation, those discussions currently underway because it must be a whole province, multi-municipality decision to undertake these restrictions.

Why it’s so important for us in the City of Cape Town, notwithstanding the fact that our own intervention, should we go at it ourselves, having a small impact on the overall dam volume, it will have an impact in terms of the rands and cents pinch that our residents will experience in our municipality, because restrictions then introduce a new set of tariffs, which makes water more expensive the more water you use, ultimately, and we’re saying that that’s not fair to our residents.

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This is why we need to undergo these restrictions with all other municipalities pulling in the same direction.

JEREMY MAGGS: How tense or tricky are those negotiations with DWS right now?

ZAHID BADROODIEN: Maybe if I can respond to that first by saying the municipalities that we’ve engaged with, that our mayor (Geordin Hill-Lewis) has reached out to, that our officials have reached out to, are all in alignment.

It seems to me that DWS, at this moment – there’s no softer way to say it – is dragging its feet on this particular matter.

As a city, we’ve said to them, guys, start your modelling early in terms of what your water predictions will be based on the impact of the El Niño, based on climate patterns that have passed and based on other predictions as well, so that we then are led by you as the national entity to make that decision around restrictions, proactively holding us all accountable.

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It seems to me that DWS prefer to wait until the end of the hydrological year, which is the end of October, which in my opinion, is the wrong decision, and certainly the reason why we will continue to push them to do their modelling early and to make a decision early.

Also to say this is the reason why our mayor has written to the national DWS, to the minister (Pemmy Majodina) herself to say, we need your leadership. This was about three weeks or a month ago. Still no response.

JEREMY MAGGS: So if DWS doesn’t get its act together, what’s the likely trajectory going to be in terms of a constant water supply to Cape Town to reassure residents and businesses?

ZAHID BADROODIEN: As it stands, the dam supply, the water volume is stable. We will certainly get through another year or two.

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We’ve seen that during the previous drought period we went through as a city that our dams are able to hold for about two years, and certainly us as a municipality, the City of Cape Town, must continue to ramp up our new water programme efforts quite significantly.

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Our groundwater abstraction, our managed aquifer recharge programmes are certainly going to be coming online, bringing additional potable water supply, currently already producing potable water supply, but more to come.

Then our alien invasive plant removal already saving up to 38 million litres of water a day because those alien invasive plants are no longer sucking the water which should be making its way into the dams, and also no longer sucking the water out of the dams for its purposes.

Obviously, just to balance it by saying we replace these alien invasive plants with natural vegetation to that particular biome.

So work is underway. We’re currently water stable.

We anticipate that we will be for the next year or two, but we certainly at the same time need to start using water more responsibly and then eventually reducing water usage should there be no rains in this particular month.

Read: From day zero to El Niño, the next drought could be worse than we think

We were joking prior to the interview that as I speak to you, the clouds look as if they want to rain, and I think there’s currently a collective prayer in our city that some rain comes, so that the impact to our residents is not as tight as what they may fear it to be.

JEREMY MAGGS: Dr Zahid Badroodien, thank you very much indeed. Cape Town’s mayoral committee member for water and sanitation.

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