Groundwater in South Africa
Ministerial speech on South Africa's Groundwater, as delivered by South Africa's Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry (Professor Kader Asmal, MP), on the launch of a first in a series of Groundwater Maps for South Africa, Bisho, Eastern Cape, DWAF, 1 February 1999. It is being publicised to coincide with the celebration of Water Week, from March 14 - March 21 1999, and of World Water Day on March 22 1999.
Speech by Prof. Kader Asmal, MP
Minister Of Water Affairs & Forestry
We have, beneath the earth in South Africa, gems beyond measure. Not just diamonds and gold and other precious metals that help drive the South African economy. No, I mean liquid gems, the largely untapped, largely unexplored and up till now largely unexplored and up till now largely unmapped resources of underground water. They are like the gems of deep sea and distant desert that, in the words of the poet “born to blush unseen and waste their sweetness on the desert air”.
There are fables, which I have heard told in breathless tones, of huge underground lakes particularly in the Northern Province that, if they can only be found, will replenish the country's scarce water supply for all time.
Recognition
It is now time to place in the context of fact. It is time to know what water lies beneath the earth, and how best to protect it and, if necessary, to use it but with discretion. We do so at a time when water resources are no longer an official secret, with what is known protected by an iron law because it was seen as a strategic source of a country at war. So, in the search for it now can be both vigorous and public, in line with our new democratic order.
There is, indeed, growing international recognition that groundwater is an often unnoticed and unacknowledged cornerstone in the foundation of many regional economic and environmental systems. That is why the United Nations decided to devote World Water Day last year to groundwater under the theme “Groundwater - the invisible resource”.
Groundwater is a major source no only of safe water, but a key factor in local development and poverty alleviation. In fact, nearly half of the world's population - a staggering figure - depends on groundwater sources for drinking water supply and for other uses. The reasons are obvious -groundwater occurrence is widespread, is generally safe to drink if protected against pollution and is affordable and close to the community who can manage it.
Basic Needs
Why, then, did groundwater receive so little attention in South Africa in the past? This has very little to do with its occurrence and a lot to do with government priorities. The emphasis of the previous government, and with it the old Department of Water Affairs, was on bulk water supply to the urban, industrial and agricultural sectors, and this meant cheap water mainly for whites, with blacks doing the best they could.
Only through the democratisation process of the 1994-election, did the meeting of people's most basic needs, including water supply and sanitation needs, become a government priority. There had been scandalous neglect in the past for reasons that are known to all of us.
And, linked to this, just like in the rest of the world, groundwater's importance has risen dramatically. Because of the highly distributed nature of the water demand in rural and even in informal urban situations, regional schemes are in most instances not economically viable. Looking locally, we find decreasing river and spring flows during the dry season and drought periods, as well as widespread problems of surface water pollution in both urban and rural areas.
All this makes groundwater, despite its generally low yield nature, the most feasible option to meet the massive backlog in domestic water needs in most parts of the country. The Eastern Cape is a typical example of this trend. Following the various RDP phases, we had the El Nino Mitigation Project under which a total of R36 million was spent on water supply projects. More than 50% of this allocation was spent on groundwater projects, spread over the provinces in places like Mqanduli, Central Willowvale, Stutterheim, Lady Frere, Umtata/Tsolo, Alice and Middeldrift.
Cost Recovery
A heartening statistic from this programme is that of about 46 diesel powered borehole schemes implemented, 44 are currently running according to the laid down policy of cost recovery. This must be seen against the total cost recovery of only about 1% from all DWAF operated and maintained community schemes, a figure that should spur us into ensuring greater sustainability. I believe that people can identify with their own local groundwater source and scheme and are prepared to maintain it.
Coverage
Two weeks ago we celebrated the 3 millionth citizen in South Africa served with a minimum water supply since the start of the government's RDP programme. This has reduced the water backlog by something like a quarter or a fifth, depending on the figures one depends on.
The task ahead remains daunting, particularly so in the Eastern Cape. Here some 52% of the approximately 5 700 communities do not have a water source at all. Where there is a source, groundwater is used in nearly 70% of cases, either as a sole source or in combination with surface water. Overall, groundwater has the potential to serve over 80% of communities in the Eastern Cape - a clear change in outlook from a few years ago when this was viewed the Cinderella of water resources in South Africa and its planned use was relegated to the dry Western parts of the country, where it is virtually the only source of water.
To achieve more rapid coverage and to reach the truly rural and peri-urban poor with groundwater, we will, however, have to extend our strategy of bulk water supply through large reticulation networks to one of “low tech” solutions executed by local borehole drilling, hand pump, spring protection and maintenance teams. Only in this way can we open the way to universal access to water supply and sanitation services.
Importance
The strategic importance of groundwater, besides its widespread occurrence and generally good quality, I believe, lies in its amenability to the above-mentioned local solutions.
Overall, groundwater is still considerably under-used in South Africa, whereas surface water resources are becoming more and more stretched. Due to lack of information on its availability and proper utilisation, groundwater is still widely held to be an unreliable resource, leading to a continued bias towards surface water resources. Poor performance by a considerable section of the groundwater industry and an often complete lack of operation and maintenance of groundwater schemes - out of sight, out of mind - is contributing to this.
Vulnerability
Although groundwater is resilient, it is ultimately very vulnerable to poor management. Some obvious and less obvious factors are: Its invisible nature, the often long delays before impacts of over-exploitation and pollution manifest themselves, its very limited self-purification capacity and the near impossibility to rehabilitate it, once it has become polluted.
Increasing levels of development and increasing population density have already led to deterioration of South Africa's groundwater resources. Some of our highest potential groundwater aquifers are located in areas of greatest development. For example, the cape Flats aquifer, part of the important coastal aquifer system, and the dolomitic aquifers of Gauteng Province underlie large residential, mining and industrial development. Deterioration of these aquifers is already reaching serious proportions and their viability is currently threatened.
The local impact of communities on their own groundwater sources is also worrying. Bacteriological and chemical contamination around community supply points like boreholes and springs requires attention, to protect human health.
The main attention worldwide has been on the more obvious and visible sources of pollution, in particular industrial sources. However, groundwater is also particularly subject to a more insidious threat by what we call diffuse pollution, i.e. less intensive contamination spread over extensive areas, e.g. agricultural fertilisers, air pollution and poor sanitation in dense settlements.
Management
Groundwater's management is complicated by the typical “common pool” problem. While individual use or misuse may not result in a significant problem, the combined impact is often unacceptable. The question is: who is responsible and how does one regulate this situation?
Under the previous water act, regulation was near impossible, because groundwater was legally defined as “private” water, to which the individual had the virtually sole right of use on his or her property. This explains the serious problems of over-use, wherever large abstractions of groundwater took place, especially for irrigation, whether from the Table Mountain Sandstone near Uitenhage, the Dolomites of Grootfontein in North West Province or the Granites of Dendron near Pietersburg.
Water Policy
Given the strategic importance of groundwater, the poor management situation sketched above the growing water scarcity in South Africa, it became evident that groundwater management, needed a complete overhaul.
The policy at the basis of the new National Water Act strongly reflects the recent political thinking enshrined in our constitution. Water resources are seen as an indivisible asset, with the National Government as its custodian to ensure that development, apportionment, management and use of the resources are carried out, using the criteria of public interest, sustainability, equity and efficiency of use.
The Act stands on two major legs, namely resource utilisation and resource protection. All significant resource use will in future need an authorisation, either a general authorisation or an individual licence. This presents a major change for groundwater users, and a major opportunity for improved management of this endangered resource.
Practice
How will devolution of water allocation work in practice? The country has already been subdivided into 18 water management areas which will ultimately all have a catchment management agency whose terms of reference are set out in the National Water Act. In the Eastern Cape three such management areas are proposed.
Each agency will have a board representative of the major stakeholders in a specific catchment, for example for the Mzimvubu to Buffalo Catchment area. Agencies will develop their own catchment management plans within the framework of National Water Resources Strategy on which my Department is already hard at work. Such a plan will address the allocatable water in the catchment, the allocation priorities, special protection measures, use charges, etc. Once such a plan has been accepted. Allocation, including licensing can take place as a continuous process with appropriate monitoring and re-evaluation.
And Pretoria will stand back a bit. It will give up much of the vast array of centralised powers it had in the past in water matters. But it should be noted that while utilisation management will be devolved, as far as possible, to achieve stakeholder participation and efficiency of use, resource protection will remain the responsibility of the national custodian, my Department.
The main instrument in the Act to ensure protection for our water resources is the Reserve, something probably unique in water management anywhere. It provides for both the equity objective of the Act through a reserve component for basic human needs and for the environmental sustainability objectives through an ecological reserve component.
Examples
A few examples illustrate the ecological component a bit further. Over-pumping of groundwater near the sea can lead to seawater intrusion rendering your water source useless. This has happened in many parts of the world and reserving part of the groundwater flow in coastal areas is a precautionary measure we will have to take to prevent the same happening here.
In other parts of the country we may want to protect our riverine ecosystems which have many different values and also maintain our water resource in a healthy state. In many parts groundwater provides the major contribution to the dry season river flow, the so-called base flow of river. Not allocating all the groundwater and reserving it for this purpose means that we are working towards the sustainability objective enshrined in our constitution. These are difficult decisions to make, affecting society, which is why the National Water Act provides for stakeholder participation in the setting of protection objectives in particular catchment.
Strategy
A groundwater quality management strategy, developed with considerable stakeholder participation, will shortly be released as a further crucial element of implementing the Act. The strategy proposes a hierarchy of interventions to manage impacts on groundwater quality, which takes the unique nature of groundwater into account, i.e.:
- Encouragement of self-imposed discipline;
- Influence over best practices and direct controls implemented by other authorities;
- Regulatory control in terms of the Water Act.
Some of the guidelines to support self-management have already been produced, e.g. for borehole construction and for appropriate sanitation. Many more, like for underground storage tanks and for use of agricultural pesticides, are still needed.
Vision
There is talk of “water crisis”, but at the same time talk of tremendous opportunity, because water, and the need to share it, can also become a learning ground for building community at all levels, from local to international.
We in South Africa agree with this need to attack the problem in an integrated way and on all fronts and, in particular, with the new emphasis on the local level and the need for a devolved management of water resources.
A local groundwater resource can easily be recognised as a common pool, which must be shared and is a source of community rather than a source of conflict, given the appropriate enabling framework created by government.
Lastly, it must be recognised that only local government can achieve true integrated development, through integration of different functions including water and sanitation development together with hygiene education towards achieving improved community health, domestic water supply together with agricultural water supply to achieve economic development and water and land management to achieve a holistic resource protection.
Partnership
In all the new participative structures the idea of partnership will be crucial, i.e. openness to all users, in particular women, people living in poverty and disadvantaged groups.
With so many new and different role-players to be involved in groundwater management, it is essential that government plays a strong facilitating and support role. It is this, to a large extent new, role that we want to launch with you today.
The groundwater maps, the beautiful posters and the ambitious groundwater liaison committee will just remain paper and talk if we do not all work together to employ them towards a more sustainable use of our shared resource - groundwater.
KwaZulu-Natal is a step ahead in this regard in that role-players came together some two years ago to plan and finance their own groundwater map series under the leadership of my Department. However, the Eastern Cape is catching up, because today we launch the first of the national map series and these cover the whole of the Eastern Cape.
Now it is up to you to help maintain the groundwater data flow to the National Groundwater Data Base and work with the Water Affairs Regional Office to obtain increasingly relevant information and to spread the groundwater management message in the Province. They already have, amongst others, all existing borehole data available on a Web Site for your use, guidelines for sustainable groundwater development, water quality guidelines and guidelines for protecting your groundwater resources.
The Eastern Cape groundwater liaison committee, to be established this afternoon, can be the ideal forum to achieve these objectives if we work together in the common interest. By the time the province is covered with catchment agencies and water user associations, your liaison committee will probably have served its purpose. If you view groundwater as a common heritage in which all have fundamental rights, it is most important not to delay further the start of a process of partnership in groundwater resource management - and, with that, I would like to officially launch the groundwater map series and pledge the Government's commitment to increasing support for groundwater management country-wide and down to local level.