18 Sep 2013

The Vice President, Dr Ponatshego Kedikilwe, has told residents of Hukuntsi and Macheng area in Kgalagadi District that an emergency project to argument the low water supply for Macheng villages has been conceived.

Speaking in a kgotla meeting in Hukuntsi on September 16, Dr Kedikilwe said government came up with a P50 million project, which is expected to be completed in December 2014.

The project was at tender evaluation stage and involved installation of packed water treatment at Lehututu, design and built treatment, electrification and equipping of two boreholes in Maake, interconnection of pipelines including new pipelines to Maake and construction of evaporation ponds.

Dr Kedikilwe said Macheng villages were serviced by four boreholes, two in Lehututu and two in Lokgwabe but the villages were faced with serious water shortage due to increasing water demand and declining yields from the operating boreholes.

The Maake water supply scheme, he said, had been decommissioned due to its defunct booster station and pipeline hence boreholes were being over-pumped and water was bowsed to Maake and other villages of Hunhukwe, Monong and Ncaang as a mitigation measure.

He said the salty quality of water also caused pipe encrustation, adding that the over pumping of boreholes and water bowsing were not sustainable as the former damaged the aquifer and latter led to high operation and maintenance costs.

On other issues, Vice President Kedikilwe explained that the status of rain in Botswana might lead to a complete drying up of some of the country’s major dams, a thing that led to a second phase of the north-south carrier pipe line from Dikgatlong Dam to recharge Gaborone Dam

He further stated that Botswana was optimistic to acquire 490 million cubic litres of water from the Zambezi River to be used in the agro commercial farming project at the Pandamatenga farms as a way of increasing food production, thus reducing dependency on food imports.

He also stated that Botswana had riparian water rights to source out water from the Orange River in South Africa because the river had Molopo and Nossop rivers as its tributaries.

The residents applauded the government’s efforts to remedy the water crisis in Kgalagadi through the Macheng water project but they decried of shortage of shortage of water for livestock, particularly for beneficiaries of the Remote Area Development Programme. Ends