Newsmaker: Denise van Huyssteen on Gqeberha’s water crisis

Business chamber CEO blames looming Day Zero on lack of maintenance and a broken municipality

Denise van Huyssteen, CEO of the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber, says the metro’s water crisis, which has brought it to the brink of Day Zero, could have been

avoided.

“Yes, there is a drought, we all know that. But this is a water management crisis. It could have been averted if we’d had a functioning municipality.”

She says 40% of the metro’s water supply is being lost “because of years and years of no investment in infrastructure maintenance”.

The Nooitgedacht water scheme, a project to bring water from the Orange River, which was commissioned in 1993 but has still to be completed, brings 230Mla day into the metro.

Were it not for unrepaired leaks and other wastage, that would be enough, Van Huyssteen says.

“So leaks and infrastructure issues are a major cause of the crisis.”

The business chamber entered into a partnership with the municipality last week called “adopt a leak”, whereby local businesses volunteer their resources and services to repair water leaks.

“It’s a race against time,” she says. But the situation is so far gone and the infrastructure so broken that it might be unwinnable.

Given the urgency, why has it taken so long for business to get cracking?

“We’ve been engaging on this topic for a long time. It hasn’t been easy to get the municipality to allow us to get involved because we’re touching their infrastructure.

“They’ve now finally realised it’s an emergency and we need to come in and do this.”

Eighteen months ago, “after it became obvious that a water crisis was coming”, the chamber started an initiative that has so far led to businesses “adopting” 65 schools and clinics where 10% of water leaks happen.

They get leaks fixed, install rainwater harvesting methods and dig boreholes.

Another business initiative called “adopt a substation” was begun because of cable theft and vandalism that caused manufacturers to lose electricity for days at a time, costing billions in lost exports.

The chamber signed a memorandum of understanding with the municipality allowing manufacturers to extend private security monitoring from their operations to the substations in their areas.

“We’re trying to prevent a humanitarian crisis and ensure we retain investment and jobs in this metro,” says Van Huyssteen.

The chamber represents more than 700 companies in the metro, including two of the biggest auto manufacturers in the country, Volkswagen and Ford.

“These businesses don’t want to leave this metro, they’ve been here for years. There’s a strong sense of collaboration among them that we’re going to work together to get through this crisis.”

All these business initiatives could have started a lot sooner and would have helped avert the current crisis, she says. But getting approval for them has been a major challenge.

“They need municipal agreement and that’s been difficult.

“We work with whoever the government of the day is, but we’ve had huge political instability to the extent that we’ve had 15 acting city managers in the last five years, and five mayors since 2018.”

Because of constantly changing coalitions and city councils, crucial resolutions and budgets haven’t been passed “and so you don’t have service delivery”.

“We’ve engaged with whoever is there, but you engage with the powers that be only for them to then change again.”

But Van Huyssteen thinks the crisis has brought “a recognition that you need some kind of social compact, you need the partnership between government and business to get the basics working so that we can retain investment and jobs”.

Business has adopted a strategic plan to prioritise “getting the city working again and pursue a path of self-reliance”.

Among other steps, this has led to the creation of a renewable energy cluster with 26 of the biggest businesses on board so far.

“We’ve got collaboration between competitors like we’ve never seen before. There’s a commitment, despite everything that’s been happening politically in the country, to make it and succeed and still be here.”

There’s also new willingness by the government to partner with business “because I think there’s a realisation that they’re not going to solve these problems on their own, that we’re all in this together”.

The chamber is now meeting every week with the Amatola Water Board to advise it on priorities.

It has open channels of communication with the municipality, “and we all have the same goal”.

Political instability, however, remains

“an ongoing concern for business”.

Half the time the sector does not know who the municipal manager is that it’s supposed to be dealing with.

“I think at the moment there are three in the works,” Van Huyssteen says. “You can’t even make this stuff up. We can’t have acting city managers. We must have stability of government. These coalition governments are very difficult to deal with because you have the smaller parties calling the shots.

“You don’t have an absolute majority by any one party so they keep changing sides.”

There are 13 political parties represented in the city council. At the start of the year, the business chamber took a decision to meet with every one of them, which it has now done.

“We spoke to them about the political instability and how it affects economic instability, and that we need them all to put the best interests of the citizens and the metro first.

“They all agreed but when they walked out the door they carried on with their different agendas in council.”

She says the political instability has prevented municipal officials from employing the people they should have been employing to deal with the water crisis.

“There are hardly any engineers or artisans in the municipality, and those are the skills we need.”

Through its “adopt a leak” scheme business is helping to fill these key skills gaps.

It may have come too late to avert day zero but Van Huyssteen believes the crisis “could help map a new way forward in terms of how business and government in the future work together to find innovative solutions to the challenges that the country faces”.

They’ve now finally realised it’s an emergency and we need to come in and do this

Denise van Huyssteen