Clearing sanitation backlog requires 400 million Rand in Capricorn District Municipality

Sanitation is a major challenge in service delivery in South Africa. In the Capricorn District Municipality (CDM) based in Polokwane (Pietersburg) in Limpopo Province the backlog of people not served with basic sanitation is 52 percent. CDM needs around 400 million Rand to clear the backlog to provide decent sanitation to communities in its five local municipalities: Polokwane, Aganang, Blouberg, Molemole and Lepelle-Nkumpi. That means 60 percent of CDM’s total 2008/2009 budget of 661 million Rand.

At the end of March the CDM council upped the 2008-2009 budget by R 40 million to address the current service delivery backlog in water (15 per cent), sanitation (52 per cent) and electricity (22 percent). It brought the total expenditures in the financial year 2009 for these sectors to:
Water – R184 million
Sanitation – R54 million
Electricity – R42 million.

Given this annual sanitation budget it will take another seven to eight years to clear the R400 million sanitation backlog of 285,534 households in the four local municipalities.

Aganang, Blouberg, Molemole and Lepelle-Nkumpi are among the 52 most vulnerable municipalities nationally identified in the recent national assessment of the state of local government.

VIP toilets and hygiene training

In early November CDM Executive Mayor Motalane Monakedi handed over the last of 2,700 keys to ventilated improved pit toilets to residents of areas that in December 2008 were hit by cholera in Molomole and Blouberg. The district municipality helped local service providers appointed by the municipalities to construct the toilets. This was based on action by the Disaster Response Task Team comprising CDM, Department of Water Affairs and Department of Health.

CDM is also implementing school sanitation programmes. Of the 932 schools in the Capricorn district more than 90 percent have been provided with sanitation and water facilities in the school. The same goes for nearly 90 percent of the 92 health clinics, mobile or attached to a hospital.

In most of the sanitation projects implemented by the district municipality hygiene training is included before project hand-over. That is done by the same local service providers that did the construction. The hygiene training covers the use of the toilet, the cleaning after use, the use of paper rather than stones or other local materials, and handwashing. “A toilet should be treated as another part of the house that is just situated at the corner of a yard”, says Jabu Masondo, Communications Manager at CDM, and ex Junior Professional Officer at IRC for 15 months in 2004 and 2005.

The hygiene training is done by local project steering committees and consultants. The district Institutional and Social Development department is with six staff involved in the planning and monitoring of these training programmes. They have developed manuals for this and also for training project steering committess.

86 percent has access to water

As in many other places in the world Capricorn district’s basic service delivery on water is scoring better than on sanitation. To date 86 percent of the households have access to clean water, including 73,154 households that benefit from the Free Basic Water provision of 6,000 litres per month. CDM is the Water Services Authority for the local municipalities that monitors supply and quality of water. The district also purchased 12 water trucks at a cost of R8.4 million, with a capacity of 8,000 litres each. CDM’s Executive Mayor Motalane Monakedi handed them over to the other four local municipalities after cholera had struck in some areas in December 2008. The trucks also help address the backlog in the water scarce areas of the four Water Services Providers.

CDM has transferred operation and maintenance functions of water schemes to local service providers. All volunteer water pump operators are now fully remunerated so that water supply is not interrupted because a bolt is missing, the mayor said. “We also implemented measures to counteract the loss of pump engines. We have invested in water quality management systems; we are planning to build a water laboratory and we have also employed water quality experts”, the mayor explained. Mayor Monakedi is one of the longest standing political leaders, who understand the issues at municipal level, sources around him explain.

CDM doing better on service delivery than other municipalities

All these actions and figures show that CDM is doing better on service delivery than many other municipalities. The Capricorn district in 2008 won the Vuna Awards for service delivery, as the best performer among the 283 municipalities in South Africa. Service delivery is one of five key performance indicators on which the central government assesses the performance of all the municipalities. The other indicators are:

• Local economic development
• Financial viability
• Infrastructure and basic delivery
• Good governance and public participation

These are also the areas of a national assessment of why municipalities perform poorly conducted across the country between April and August 2009. “Key elements of the local government system in South Africa are showing signs of distress in 2009”, according to the State of Local Government Report (October 2009).

The assessment is the initiative of the Minister for Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (COGTA), Mr Sicelo Shiceka. They were designed to ascertain the root causes of the current state of distress in many of the county’s municipalities, as evidenced in the many protests of unhappy citizens and news reports about failing municipal services since early 2008. This highly critical report is also informing A Turn-Around Strategy for Local Government that the ANC government is calling for, “which will be driven by an intergovernmental and social compact agenda for change”.

An island in Limpopo province

This report also shows that CDM is an island in Limpopo province, having the country-wide highest water backlogs per household of 17.2 percent), followed KwaZulu-Natal (16%) and Eastern Cape province (12,8%). These three provinces together constitute 75,5% of the national share of water backlogs.

These three provinces are consistently cited in terms of highest poverty, unemployment, and high service backlogs. They are closely followed by Limpopo, whose sanitation backlog figure is at 47%, that is, nearly half, of all households in the province have no or inadequate sanitation. This is a huge health risk.

Nationally, 213 830 households would need to be served per year until 2014 to eradicate the existing backlog, which does not take into account growth, formation of new households and infrastructure failures that contribute to backlogs. This is an enormous challenge to be managed across government.

Not all rosy

But it is not all rosy in CDM on other fronts. The national assessment task team that visited Capricorn district included officials from the national department of cooperative governance, the Office of the Premier, and the Southern Africa Local Government Association (SALGA). In general the team was concerned with:

• Delay in responsiveness to issues raised by communities.
• Fragmented relations between the political and administrative sections.
• Insufficient capacity of ward committees.
• Non-compliance to the Municipal Finance Management Act.
• Disintegrated planning of service delivery programme with sector departments.
• Delayed maintenance of infrastructure.
• Integrated Development Plan and budgeting processes not aligned in some municipalities.

Anti-Fraud Hotline

CDM appointed a risk officer, who is looking into allegations on corruption and fraud against staff from the municipality. They come to him through the independent, toll-free Anti-Fraud Hotline 0800 205053 that was re-launched in March 2009. This hotline “gets hotter on corruption”, as CDM puts it in its September 2009 newsletter “Mogarafase”. The hotline was first started in 2006 and there are now four serious reported cases being investigated.

Limpopo district: lack of adequate budget planning

In total Limpopo province has six district municipalities. The Auditor General identified a worrying trend in Limpopo province which might be indicative of a lack of capacity to adequately plan (budget), particularly the projection or estimation of revenue. The budget for operating revenue was for example R 5.15 million but a total of R 9.67 million (187.7%) was received. Of the R9,67 million received, R4.7 was spent, which represents an over expenditure against the planned or budgeted R2.48 for operating expenditure. It must also be noted that in Limpopo province the Auditor General qualified 58% of municipalities on expenditure (2007/8) that could either be the result of inadequate filing systems or possible maladministration of revenue.

Dick de Jong, based on interviews with Jabu Masondo and documents in Polokwane, November 2009