NEWS ANALYSIS

As has become the norm, President Jacob Zuma was to deliver his annual State of the Nation address on Thursday shortly after the Mail & Guardian‘s print edition went to press.

The contents of the speech is a closely guarded secret, and the Zuma administration does not make copies available to the media in advance.

But some assumptions can be safely made about it, among them: the country will be cynical when he talks about electricity and downplays both the seriousness of the current power shortages and the government’s culpability for them, but he will get a free pass when he proclaims that great strides have been made in providing water to more South Africans, and that there is more to come.

The effect of electricity load-shedding is nearly universal and impossible to ignore, but the water crisis is, at present, largely the problem of the rural poor. Despite short water failures in parts of Johannesburg and Cape Town in recent weeks, residents of metropolitan areas can safely assume that water will flow from the tap, and that it will be safe to drink.

This is not the case for many people who live in smaller settlements in large swaths of the country. And, increasingly, their protests about the lack of water, most recently in places such as Malamulele and Majakaneng, involve extreme acts of violence in a desperate attempt to stand out from all the other communities demanding similar relief.

Sometimes their tactics do gain succour. But, as unfolding events in eastern Limpopo show, they come at a price – and the respite might be as transient as all that came before it.

Water issues

The people of the Mopani district municipality in the far northeastern corner of the country have been struggling with water issues for a long time. In the larger towns in the municipality, such as Tzaneen in the west and Phalaborwa in the east, water can be erratic and of dubious quality. In Giyani, near the district’s northern border, the water troubles are worse. In the rural reaches in between, it is not just trouble with water but often no water at all.

According to official figures, as many as a fifth of the people living in the Mopani district still have no access to running water, and another third have to carry water from sometimes far-off communal taps.

In recent years alone, nearly R500-million has been spent trying to fix the many problems causing the problems – almost entirely in vain.

“Everything was broken,” said a contractor with intimate knowledge of water infrastructure in the area. “Nothing was working – not the boreholes, not the pipes, not the pumps, nothing.”

For two decades, the district, local and provincial governments seemed unable to do much about the situation. But, in August 2014, things started to change, and fast. Not yet three months into her job, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane arrived in the Mopani region like a whirlwind. No more, she told residents, would companies benefit from tenders without delivering water, and no more would local officials write misleading reports saying the situation was under control when it palpably was not so.

“We are taking over anything that has to do with water and sanitation in the district,” she said.

Fait accompli

That was not so much a promise as a fait accompli. The previous week, a task team had assessed the area’s water infrastructure and estimated it would take R96.4-million to plug the worst holes and finish work already under way – small change, relatively speaking.

Within days, the Mopani district municipality’s right to supply water to its own residents had been officially pulled and a contract for the work had been signed. By the end of October, Mokonyane was standing next to a smiling Zuma as they “launched” the existing water treatment plant for the area. The only thing missing from the picture was a banner with the words: “Mission accomplished”.

But the job was decidedly not done. Even at that time, alarming anomalies were starting to pile up. Within five weeks of the emergency project being declared, the estimated costs had grown from R96.4-million to R502.6-million, documents in the possession of the M&G show.

Thulani Majola heads up LTE, responsible for the Limpopo water project. (Julian Cole)

In response to questions, the national department of water (which is funding the project) and the regional supplier, Lepelle Northern Water (the national department’s implementing agent for the project) confirmed the figure, but said there was nothing untoward about the quintupling of the cost.

“The amount of R502.6-million was not an escalation,” the department said. “It was a result of the outcome of the development of a full business plan by Lepelle Northern Water, which detailed the extent of the work, costing of the plan up to implementation, which would bring water to the people by way of source to tap/yard.”

Project prices

But documents show that individual jobs within the bigger project, such as fixing the water supply to a hospital, had jumped nearly 20 times in price.

Although the department of water will foot the entire bill, the determination of cost is left to Lepelle. Internal documents show that Lepelle claims a 6% management fee for all the work done. Under the original estimate, Lepelle’s cut would have been just shy of R5.8-million, but the increased size of the project will see it earn more than R30-million.

Like other such institutions, Lepelle’s performance is measured in part by its revenues and the surplus it achieves.

Lepelle, in turn, appointed LTE Consulting as a turnkey contractor for the project, making LTE responsible for planning work, handling procurement, and signing off on completed work.

But LTE has been in a state of civil war since December, when its founder and director, Asogan Pillay, resigned from the board of its holding company, over disputes about a R200-million contract in Gauteng. In a resignation letter to staff, Pillay said he had only “recently” learnt that LTE was responsible for the Mopani project, four months after the company had been appointed.

Home burglary

Pillay said his family home has been robbed twice since then; in one case, he said, it was the day after he told the ANC about what he believed to be a monumental fraud.

“On the previous day, I had documents delivered to [ANC headquarters] Luthuli House to the top six,” Pillay told the M&G. “It was a four-page letter indicating or intending to inform the president of the country and president of the ANC as well as the other officials … that I believe this is a fraud exceeding R1-billion.”

Pillay said the ANC advised him to lay criminal charges, which he did.

LTE, in turn, documents show, employed the services of two companies to handle construction, Khato Civils and South Zambezi. Both are controlled by the same person, Simbi Phiri. He was once an employee of LTE and is listed as the director of at least one company with two other directors: Pillay, and LTE’s chief executive officer, Thulani Majola.

Khato Civils is also a contractor on the Gauteng project over which Pillay resigned.

Neither Phiri nor Majola returned calls asking for comment.

Corruption investigation

A top official of the Gauteng provincial government said it would investigate the project in which LTE and Khato were involved in that province, as part of a broader investigation into corruption under the previous administration when Mokonyane was premier.

Responding to written questions, Lepelle said the legal status of companies it appointed was a key consideration, and an investigation would not affect that.

“I regard an investigation as an honest process of gathering facts in an attempt to make better under­standing of a particular situation or subject,” the acting chief executive, Phineas Legodi, wrote. “Consequently, investigation alone would not rattle us.”

Meanwhile, the national department of water said it had paid R176-million for work in Mopani to the end of January and was satisfied with the value received for that sum based on Lepelle’s feedback.

“[Lepelle] is our implementing agent. Thus far, there is no anomaly within the work they have done. The project is still on course according to reports as submitted by Lepelle.”

More leaks than a rusty bucket

Is the country’s top water bureaucrat at work? It depends on when you ask him.

In January, the M&G said that one of the reasons for South Africa’s water woes is that the acting directors general in charge of the department have, one after another, been suspended.

The apparent director general, Maxwell Sirenya, responded with outrage. In a letter to the M&G citing the press code, demanding an apology and framing the comment as either laziness or the fruit of a sinister agenda, Sirenya was adamant that he was still in charge.

“The facts are that I am the current director general, with a five-year contract,” Sirenya wrote in the letter published on February?6. “I am not under suspension. I am unaware of any acting director general running the department.”

Two days later, newspapers in the Independent Media stable quoted Sirenya in what appears to be a direct contradiction to the assertions in his letter.

“It started in February 2013, so it’s almost two years now. I’m not at work. I’m at home. I’m being paid for doing nothing,” Sirenya reportedly told the papers.

Sirenya also told Independent Media that he was suspended and disciplined by Edna Molewa, who was water minister at the time, despite his efforts “to protect the interests of the state”.

The M&G reported at the time of his suspension that it was because he had refused to sign off on an information technology contract for the department. This had created a conflict between the minister and Sirenya.

The contradiction between these two public statements is a useful illustration of the situation at the national department responsible for water and sanitation, but is not representative of the scope of the problem. The department is sharply divided between different camps, all keen to accuse the others of dirt. Over the course of two weeks a succession of unsolicited anonymous sources – some with access to the highest echelons of the department – peddled to the M&G a variety of allegations about sexual impropriety, fraud, corruption, back-stabbing and office politics. None could be proven.

What is clear, however, and corroborated across the leaks is that battles have been ongoing in the department since it was spun off from environment affairs in 2014. Last year Nomvula Mokonyane, the former premier of Gauteng, was put in charge of the newly amalgamated department of water and sanitation – with sanitation being brought back from the human settlements department.

The narrative created is one in which Mokonyane took “her people” from the province – including former communications director Peggy Mabuza and director of government business Joy Dladla – and moved them to national government to replace those already in place. This caused resentment.

Mokonyane also brought in her director general, Margaret-Ann Diedricks, to assume that position at water affairs. She replaced Trevor Balzer, who had acted as director general for the years in which Sirenya and Pam Yako (his predecessor) were suspended.

Sputnik Ratau, the department’s spokesperson, says Sirenya’s situation is unclear because he is still in negotiations with the department about his suspension. But he is unequivocal when asked who the director general is: “Margaret-Ann Diedricks.” She was appointed to the position full-time in December 2014, he says. “I don’t think I have even seen Sirenya’s car here.” – Sipho Kings and Phillip de Wet