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The DA-led City of Cape Town, which markets itself as pristine and well-managed in comparison with ANC-led cities, such as Durban, is battling to explain having to close a number of popular beaches over the holiday season due to unsafe levels of sewerage.

The City would like residents to believe that increasingly regular electricity failures are to blame, and there is no doubt that high levels of loadshedding won’t help. 

But this excuse doesn’t explain away the fact of Milnerton Lagoon’s long-term contamination, or Zeekoevlei, or that many Cape Flats communities have been living with seeping sewerage for a number of years. It is rather the disparity in infrastructure and the under-investment in these communities that have left them living in these unacceptable conditions.

Nor does the loadshedding excuse make much sense when, according to the City, it has already invested in generators at its major sewerage pump stations, and is busy installing Uninterrupted Power Supplies at smaller stations.

Besides which, if loadshedding is to blame, the City would have the option of managing the situation by ensuring that pump stations are isolated and exempted from power cuts, as Gauteng is doing (with various levels of success) with medical facilities.  

The truth is that Cape Town is drowning in human excrement because its sewerage infrastructure hasn’t kept up with ever-expanding demand, and that which does exist is inadequately maintained. (Not that dissimilar to the situation Eskom is in.)

The City’s inadequate management of its dirt daily erodes human dignity in less affluent communities, and when the dirt hits the water and makes the news at the height of tourist season it threatens the tourist economy.

It is egregious that the lack of proper sanitation services to informal settlements and the inadequate sanitation services outside of the suburbs go unnoticed for months but the moment the excrement hits our beaches and affects the suburbs it has the world’s attention.

Rather than organising press gambits on the beach to smilingly assure citizens that the water is safe, Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis would do well to prioritise the City’s ailing sewerage system.

In the short-term, those pump stations that exist must be maintained and supplied with power to continue running during the intermittent blackouts. In the medium-term, shelved plans to develop more infrastructure, including new treatment works, must be resuscitated.

It’s not sexy work, but vital to the functioning of all urban areas.

Issued by Brett Herron, GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Parliament