Municipalities are taking more water from dams than they are allowed

De Bos Dam in the Hemel-en-Aarde valley was commissioned to provide the growing town of Hermanus with water. Completed in 1976, an annual extraction limit of 2.8 million cubic metres from De Bos Dam was established by a 1973 ruling of the Water Court. That limit has been repeatedly exceeded. Photos: Sean Christie

• Overstrand Municipality has exceeded its water allocation limit more than 80% of the time since 2003, yet simultaneously received top marks for water management from the water department.
• The Department of Water and Sanitation lacks effective monitoring systems, with officials admitting “nobody is keeping track of who is over-extracting”.
• Over-extraction has led to environmental disasters, playing a part in the destruction of the 12,000-year-old Onrus peatland, and has brought municipalities like Nelson Mandela Bay close to “day zero” water shortages.

Municipalities across South Africa consistently take more water from dams than they are allowed, often without facing repercussions.

The Overstrand Local Municipality in the Western Cape is a case in point. Since 2003, it has exceeded its 2,800-megalitres annual limit from De Bos Dam on the Onrus River more than 80% of the time. This is according to monthly water usage reports submitted to the Breede-Olifants Catchment Management Agency (BOCMA), which manages the Onrus river catchment on behalf of the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS).

In the Eastern Cape, Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality has a history of over-extracting from the Kromme and Kouga systems, withdrawing up to three times its allocation from Churchill and Impofu dams on the Kromme system in 2021/22.

Neighbouring Kouga Municipality also has a history of over-extracting from Churchill Dam and continues to over-extract. Further inland, Amathole District Municipality currently over-extracts from several surface water sources, taking double its daily three-million litres allowance from dams on the Stutterheim scheme.

In KwaZulu-Natal, uMngeni-Uthukela Water is licensed to take 470,000-megalitres a year from the uMngeni Water Supply System to supply eThekwini, Msunduzi, Ugu, Ilembe and uMgungundlovu municipalities. Still, it has exceeded this allowance several years running, with DWS finding that the entity abstracted almost 30,000 megalitres more than its allowance in 2023, following an investigation.

In Gauteng, excessive demand from municipalities has resulted in Rand Water every year since 2018 exceeding the amount it is licensed to abstract annually from the Vaal Dam. In 2023/24 alone, Rand Water exceeded its allocation by 193,000-megalitres. To reduce this, Rand Water has entered into agreements with the metropolitan municipalities it supplies (City of Johannesburg, City of Tshwane and City of Ekurhuleni), but these municipalities have not kept within agreed limits, causing shortages of stored water.

uMngeni-Uthukela Water is allowed to abstract a maximum of 1,288 Ml/d from KwaZulu-Natal dams, factoring in a 2-4 % loss during the treatment process. Demand has risen sharply since 2018 and the bulk water supplier has exceeded its allowance since December 2020. The DWS has given the bulk supplier 12 months from October 2024 to reduce the demand of greater Durban’s municipalities back to a proportional licenced amount.

Getting away with it

Exceeding the allocated extraction amount for a regulated water source is unlawful under the National Water Act. DWS requires major water users to monitor and record water usage and provide this information routinely or upon request, but spokesperson Wisane Mavasa told GroundUp that this information “is not consistently loaded onto the departmental systems”.

“Only one unit has access to the information, and the officials who receive the information aren’t necessarily informed on the lawful allocations as it isn’t a requirement of the reporting tools. The DWS has identified this as a challenge,” Mavasa said.

The case of Overstrand municipality is illustrative. From correspondence in GroundUp’s possession, it is clear that the DWS only became aware of the full extent of the municipality’s over-extraction from De Bos dam after requesting water usage reports in 2023. That year, Overstrand scored an unprecedented 99.99% DWS Blue Drop certification, making it the country’s top performer in water management.

The Overberg Municipality has exceeded its water allocation more than 80% of the time since 2003.

Carin Bosman, a water governance specialist at consultancy CBSS, who worked at DWS before and after 1994, says the department had no central depository for water use data.

“Nobody is keeping track of who is over-extracting. It’s a big accountability gap, and simply untenable in a water-stressed country like South Africa,” she says.

Mavasa says acting against a non-compliant municipality has become significantly more complex since the adoption of the Constitution in 1996, “which redefined local authorities as a sphere of governance, rather than a tier”.

“Typically, DWS informs the alleged transgressor of their non-compliance, and if they cannot demonstrate that they are in fact compliant, DWS will assist them in drafting planning studies, with the aim of developing additional resources to meet future demands and create more reporting tools to track water usage.”

Knowledge of non-compliance is not always followed by prompt action, and legal action is seldom brought against guilty parties.

In the Overstrand case, both DWS and BOCMA had known about its tendency to over-extract since the early 2000s but only began to look more closely in 2023 after local environmental activists demanded action.

Official complaints of over-extraction were laid against the municipality in 2024, following which BOCMA launched a compliance monitoring and enforcement process. It found the municipality had over-extracted more often than not in recent decades. BOCMA CEO Jan van Staden met Overstrand Municipal Manager Dean O’Neill on 27 February 2024 to instruct the municipality to report its water usage routinely and bring water extraction in line with court-imposed limits. According to Van Staden, all previous instances of non-compliance are effectively “water under the bridge”.

Serious consequences

The potential consequences of over-extraction were spelled out in June 2024 in a speech DWS director general Sean Phillips made to the Strategic Water Partners Network regarding the Vaal Dam – the source of drinking water for much of the urban highveld.

“It would be irresponsible to allow [Rand Water] to abstract more,” said Phillips. “If we had a drought, this could mean a day zero situation in Gauteng.”

According to former Nelson Mandela Bay Municipality executive mayor Retief Odendaal, over-extraction from the dams on the Kromme system during the dry 2021/22 years brought the municipality to the edge of disaster.

“The municipality was extracting up to 300% more than its allowance from this system, to the point that the Churchill Dam was on the verge of being decommissioned. If this had happened, a quarter of the population would have been without water indefinitely,” he said.

Environmental groups in Overstrand insist there is a link between the municipality’s over extraction from De Bos Dam and an ongoing environmental catastrophe downstream, involving the loss of the 12,000 year old Onrus peatland and the silting up of the popular Onrus Estuary.

According to Anton Kruger of the Overstrand Environmental Organisation, “Over-extraction from De Bos [dam] has led to the dam not spilling in the wet season, contributing to drying out of the peatland downstream. In 2018, the peatland caught fire and burned for nine months. It became unstable, and in September 2023 after the Overstrand experienced 135mm of rain in a 48-hour period, 80% of the peatland washed downstream, into the Onrus estuary, which is now permanently modified.”

It will cost an estimated R200-million to partly rehabilitate the peatland and the estuary, a bill that will in part be footed by billionaire Johann Rupert, whose property was impacted by the environmental disaster.

The Overstrand has not taken responsibility for causing the disaster but according to O’Neill, the municipality “has initiated a project to restore and rehabilitate the entire Onrus catchment, particularly the Onrus Peat Wetland”.

In Hemel-en-Aarde valley in the Overberg, environmental activists insist there is a direct link between the Overstrand Municipality’s management of De Bos Dam, and the loss of the Onrus peatland (pictured here) in 2023.

Why municipalities over-extract

According to Mavasa, “Many instances of over-abstraction are justified on the grounds of securing basic water supply for residents, addressing equipment failures, vandalism and power interruptions, which result in the extraction of more water than permitted from the source.”

The Overstrand is striving to keep up with the demands of a population that has more than doubled since the 2000s, according to O’Neill.

“An extensive groundwater abstraction programme was launched to make additional water available [but] it is practically impossible to have all boreholes in full production for 365 days a year, 24-hours a day, due to breakdowns and servicing and power supply interruptions, as well as normal maintenance,” O’Neill said.

uMngeni-Uthukela Water spokesperson Siyabonga Maphumulo said much of the unexpected increase in demand from its KwaZulu-Natal clients is as a result of increased water loss within the municipalities.

“Some have water loss of between 40 and 50% and many do not budget much for maintenance and rehabilitation, which exacerbates this demand increase. We would normally work on a natural growth increase of 1.5% per annum but it is clear that the current increases are well in excess of this amount. To keep up, we have been exceeding our licensed abstraction volumes,” he said.

Amathole District Municipality spokesperson Sisa Msiwa said that the municipality’s increased water consumption “can be attributed to population growth, enhanced service levels, and unfortunately, a rise in water loss due to leaks”.

“The aging infrastructure in Stutterheim, especially the asbestos pipes, is particularly susceptible to leaks,” she said.

eThekwini Municipality says the devastating 2022 floods in KwaZulu-Natal led to increased water demand

Improving Systems and Accountability

According to Mavasa, the DWS “has initiated the merging of its various regulatory systems into the Integrated Regulatory Information System. This will allow our national and regional offices to have access to data per [water] user. The department has also drafted regulations to require users to upload all self-regulating reports onto the above-mentioned system and will be obtaining comment during public consultation once gazetted in coming months.”

Any depository that is created should be made accessible to the public, said Bosman.

“It’s public information, after all. There might be understandable reasons for over-extracting, but unless the basic information is accessible community members can’t even begin to hold their leaders accountable for how water is being managed,” she said.

This story was produced with funding and editing support from the Southern Africa Accountability Journalism Project.

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