22 Aug 2021

Since March 2020 to date, Kgalagadi south district has accumulated a water debt of P2.3 million.

Adding to the existing P9 million debt, the amount clients in the districts owe Water Utilities Corporation (WUC)  totals P11.3m.  

The corporations lead engineer for Kgalagadi south, Mr Benjamin Baitshenyetsi has encouraged Batswana to pay their water bills to avoid water disconnections after State of Emergency (SoE) elapses

Speaking in an interview on Friday, Mr Baitshenyetsi said the corporation encountered serious challenge of clients who failed to settle their water bills sufficiently, a situation that worsened under SoE as the corporation was obligated to provide water as an essential service.

However, he said some clients seemed to take advantage of SoE and were not paying water utility as reflected in their records. 

The corporation, he said, had deviced strategies of debt collection.

 He said WUC had started a COVID-19 friendly visits to do mobile collections by scheduling monthly visits to  villages in remote areas.

Another debt collection strategy, Mr Baitshenyetsi said, was that water pressure was reduced in households which accumulated more debts and were served with a utility bill notification. 

Thereafter, WUC and the client entered into an arrangement of a comprehensive bill payment structure and debtors were then handed to debt collectors.

He said they had noticed that more, and more people were becoming slack in their payment which affected WUC operations as some of the water developments were put on hold or were halted due to lack of finance. 

“If clients do not pay, then we end up failing to execute some of our water development plans,” he said.

Meanwhile, the WUC lead engineer stated that government continued to strive to improve water accessibility in the area and funds had been disbursed to undertake a project of equipping of two high yielding boreholes in Tsabong and construction of a 500 meter cubic water reservoir from April 2021-March 2022. 

The project, he noted was within schedule and upon completion it was expected to improve the water situation in Tsabong and Maleshe.

Another project, he said was the improvement of water situation in the Werda cluster where a total of five boreholes had been drilled in Makopong to improve water situation in Makopong and Draaihoek. 

“We have completed drilling of boreholes of all the five boreholes and we are going to connect three high yielding boreholes, electrify, equip them and draw pipelines to village reservoirs.”

Moreover, he said WUC would install a water treatment plant because most of the high yielding boreholes produced contaminated water.  

The project, which was expected to commence in March 2022, was at the terms of reference phase, afterwards it will undergo tendering process while the project scope was expected to be completed within six months.

On other projects, Mr Baitshenyetsi said the corporation was currently drilling a new borehole at Kokotsha to meet the rising water demand. 

The borehole drilling, he said would be completed this week. 

Thereafter, they would need a maximum of two weeks to test its water quality and connect it to the existing pipeline. 

He said if the water quality was good they expected everything to be complete in three weeks.

Currently, he said Water Utilities Corporation has been bowsing water to Kokotsha, Makopong and Maleshe. “We have been bowsing 100 per cent of the water being used at Kokotsha. At Makopong bowsing has reduced because of the recently resuscitated boreholes in Makopong,” he said. Ends