Pretoria - The City of Tshwane is engaging the Department of Water and Sanitation for financial assistance after it incurred unbudgeted costs to provide tankers to residents amid the ongoing supply challenges.
It has been confirmed that Gauteng municipalities have been consuming water at concerning rates, with parts of Joburg running dry at times.
In Tshwane, the City did not budget for these costs as it was unforeseen that there would be water restrictions in this financial year.
City spokesperson Selby Bokaba, who was part of a meeting between Minister of Water and Sanitation Senzo Mchunu and Tshwane MMC for Utility Services and Regional Operations Daryl Johnston to discuss the crisis, said the matter was still being discussed.
He said there was no need to send out tankers yesterday, though residents and businesses were still being warned to use water sparingly.
He said the warnings were to inform residents that if they continued consuming large amounts of water, reservoirs would get to critical levels that could result in them fetching water from tankers in the streets.
Bokaba said they had sought the assistance of the national department to cover the costs because when the City drew up a budget for a financial year, it considered the spending of the previous financial year and inflation.
As such, they could not have a large budget as they did not foresee this crisis. Bokaba could not say how much the City had already spent on tankers this year because that would need to be investigated from region to region. However, he confirmed that they had already depleted their budget.
In recent weeks, it was revealed that the recent hot weather has contributed to water levels dropping, not just in Gauteng municipalities, but across the country. Rivers have seen a decrease in capacity.
Johnston said the meeting was used to discuss how the water crisis was affecting Gauteng.
“A key finding was that water usage across Gauteng remains high and that more work needs to be done to get people to comply with stage 2 water restrictions.”
The Department of Water and Sanitation has allowed Rand Water to temporarily abstract additional water for nine months to help Gauteng through this difficult period.
With Eskom escalating load shedding to Stage 4, the City said this was likely to affect pumping capacity for Rand Water and municipalities, heightening the need to again raise a call on consumers to play their part.
Pretoria News