07 Sep 2015

Okavango residents have been urged to stand against vandalism of pre-paid public standpipes in their areas.

Speaking in a kgotla meeting in Shakawe recently, Minister of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources, Mr Kitso Mokaila, said  all 39 pre-paid standpipes, which were commissioned in April, were vandalised.

That, Mr Mokaila said, interfered with their original plan to de-commission all the old conventional standpipes by end of May and put into operation the pre-paid ones.

He explained that there was resistance to register to acquire the necessary tokens as consumers preferred individual water connections, despite being made aware of prevailing water shortage. He informed them that prepaid stand pipes project involved the installation of pre-paid public standpipes to ensure that water was conserved, measured and billed.

“The project is also to bring water closer to the people residing in un-serviced areas as an interim measure and was completed in February 2015.”

He therefore appealed to village leaders in the sub-district to warn their villagers against the danger of destroying properties belonging to them. On private water connections, he said connections in the area were a challenge due to a limited water supply, limited storage and network coverage.

He said connection approval, was, however, considered where pressures allow and connection distances were relatively short.

Mr Mokaila said backlog for paid up applicants in Shakawe cluster stood at three for backyard connections and 48 for the rest of the connections while in Shakawe, the paid up connection backlog was 16.

Meanwhile, he said his ministry was faced with challenges, among them an aged and incapacitated network, leading to high water loses, inadequate water leading to some areas receiving little or no water at all, whilst some areas could receive water only during the night.

He said other challenges include limited water supply and inadequate or unavailable distribution network, which limits Water Utilities Corporation (WUC) to effect individual water connections. Mr Mokaila said delays in the registration and uptake of the prepaid system is not serving the pre-paid project’s objective, primarily being conservation of water.

The other challenge he said, was delayed billing of villages originally under North West District Council (NWDC) due to manual capturing and complete customer data as well as customers who were complaining of long distances to Gumare to pay their water bills.

Furthermore, he said his ministry would continue rationing the interconnected villages, following up on excerptions to improve billing efficiency and fast-track migration to SAP and mobile collection schedule in place to collect debts from individual villages.

He added that the project also addresses the floating system challenges by providing dedicated transmission liners from the rehabilitated plant and on to the existing tanks, which subsequently feeds into the distribution networks. The residents, however accused WUC staff of not cooperating well with the public concerning issues affecting the corporation. Ends