The administrator at Lekwa local municipality in Mpumalanga, Johann Mettler, says it will take at least three years to turn around the collapsed municipality.
Mettler, who was deployed in Standerton to rescue the sinking town, said National Treasury had recently published a draft municipal financial recovery plan for the town.
“The minimum anticipated time period for the turnaround in Lekwa is 36 months,” he said.
Mettler said because the sewer system had suffered decades of neglect and inadequate maintenance, the capacity of the sewerage works, waste and water treatment plants were wholly inadequate to deal with the volumes of waste water.
He said the current design capacity was 10ML (10 million litres) per day, however, the required capacity that needed to be treated was 23ML per day between the two treatment works.
The municipality has previously admitted that it is facing infrastructure problems, including sewer spillage in all areas and non-functioning sewer pump stations.
Mettler said due to inadequate maintenance over time there were also damages that had caused kilometres of collapsing and leaking sewer lines, numerous blockages caused by foreign material dumped into the sewer system, and pump stations with inadequate capacity to pump waste water to the treatment plants.
“Funding has been made available for replacing leaking sewer pipes in the Sakhile area to the value of just below R9m. There are also planned refurbishment of Standerton Waste Water Treatment Works to the value of R20m over a three-year period as well as the upgrading and refurbishment of sewer pump stations and the Coligny sewer line to the value of R21m over three years,” he said.
Mettler said the municipality had held engagements with representative community and business structures since the start of the intervention.
These included the Lekwa Pastors Fraternal, the Lekwa Black Business Forum, the Lekwa Community Forum, the Lekwa Ratepayers Association, farmers, Astral Foods, Seriti, Eskom coal company, Sasol and 15 ward committees.
The administrator said he had engaged with communities on the integrated development plans and they had decreased response times to electricity and water service outages.
Although electricity outages were still prevalent in Lekwa, Mettler said they had considered investing in aggressive maintenance of the infrastructure to address them.
“We have commenced a data-cleaning project which looks at metering of all services per stand and have discovered major discrepancies and have issued numerous fines and replaced numerous meters, both water and electricity, and identified additional revenue of around R13m for the year,” he said.
Residents have complained bitterly about deadly potholes and knee-deep holes across the town of Standerton. Mettler said R20m had been budgeted over the three-year period for the upgrading of roads within Lekwa.
“We have approached Sanral to act as a service provider as they are already on-site within the municipality. A memorandum of agreement is being finalised between the parties for the execution of the projects,” he said.
Mettler said the administration was also looking at ways of resolving the faulty billing system.
“We have also requested funding for the purchase of 2,500 meters to install on stands that currently do not have meters. About 400 households have already indicated their desire to be connected via new meters.”
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