Deputy Chairperson, hon members, we all know that water is life and that without it there will be no life. Our department is taking serious steps to address the developmental challenges facing water security in the country.
There is an old American Indian saying: "The frog does not drink up the pond in which he lives". This means that saving water is the business and responsibility of everybody in our country, and it should be a way of life for all South Africans.
While many of us in this Chamber today may rank with the more privileged and merely have to turn on a tap to enjoy bright, clean water, the hard fact and the reality is that there are still people out there without clean drinking water, and people who still travel some distance to get water.
An even harder fact is that poor people, both within and beyond our borders, continue their daily struggle to access safe water. This struggle represents the frontline in the fight against poverty and the spread of water-borne diseases that are so closely linked to poverty.
Whilst we are grappling with the challenge to ensure that all our people have access to safe drinking water, we also have to ensure that we build and maintain infrastructure that will support economic development and poverty alleviation initiatives in our country. We know we have a big challenge of ageing infrastructure that is there, and also infrastructure that was built when the population was still small.
Now that the population has grown, it becomes a big challenge. It is for this reason that we are strengthening our partnership with the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs, other departments and the private sector in order to achieve an integrated approach that will enable us to speed up service delivery.
The launch of the turnaround strategy by the Minister of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs has been embraced with great enthusiasm by our department. We have identified key water priorities which I believe are of concern to most members here. These are the refurbishment and operation of infrastructure; development of appropriate skills; delivery of water and maintenance of infrastructure; upscaling of water conservation and water demand management programmes; focusing on fixing leaks; and the active participation of women in water resource management.
We admit that the water conservation programme has not received enough attention and focus in the past. However, we are in the process of upscaling the programme. We are implementing water conservation programmes in all nine provinces with more emphasis and investment going to unaccounted-for water and to municipalities that are water-stressed.
We are grateful for the co-operation we have received from cities like eThekwini, Cape Town, Johannesburg and the Nelson Mandela Metro, which have invested millions of rands of their own funding in this programme. A lot more still needs to be done.
Hon members, we are concerned about water losses through leaking pipes and the poor maintenance of infrastructure. As we reported previously to Parliament, we launched the War on Leaks project in Mogale City during the National Water Week awareness campaign. I think this is something that we can do in our own constituencies and surroundings - to find out the extent of unaccounted-for water lost through leaks and to encourage communities to report these. People should not just report, but things must happen. Then municipalities should repair them.
Our Free State region is way ahead in this regard. They have implemented projects where women contractors have been trained to fix leaks and make a living from this programme. So there are a lot of jobs we can create through water leaks. Our preparations are advanced for the roll-out of this programme to all municipalities with high water losses. Unemployed youth will be trained to fix the leaks with users who are affected by, or who have, leaks.
Our department's intervention in the O R Tambo municipality where we have invested millions in refurbishing dilapidated infrastructure, thereby preventing water shortages, is an example of what this programme can achieve. You know, you must excuse my tongue today. I have travelled a long distance from abroad to be here.
I am also pleased to announce to this House that we are intensifying public education and awareness programmes to educate the citizens of our country about the value of water and its importance to economic growth and development. The department has initiated collaboration with water boards, water utilities and the private sector, provincial governments and municipalities, NGOs, civil society and traditional leaders. We are engaging in proposals towards an integrated approach to water resource management. This will ensure sustainability.
We have learnt that when local people are empowered with knowledge and appropriate skills, they are able to participate in all of these programmes, and our water supply will be sustainable.
We also need to fight to improve our water security and we will not win if we neglect the integrity of our ecosystems as enablers of water availability. We have neglected our indigenous knowledge of protecting water sources and rivers. Our rivers and dams are silting up because of that negligence.
During our National Water Week, we launched the Adopt-a-River project which seeks to mobilise our people, all spheres of government and the private sector. All of us must assist with this programme.
We are particularly excited about developments in the Western Cape and the Free State in this regard where, in the former, within this year a catchment management strategy for the Breede-Overberg Water Management Area will be published. This will be a blueprint for water resource management. This is the first stop in our country to steam ahead in our quest to clean up our water resources. All these things are some of the projects that we are trying in order to get clean water to all our people. The Working for Water programme, you know, has a good track record - actually, even globally.
In conclusion on the water issue, we must ensure that we have enough water, and it is the responsibility of all of us here and the people out there.
Coming to our environmental issues, we say that we are crying. We are complaining that - oh, no, we are not complaining, it is the truth - we have many challenges. All these challenges can be overcome through education and awareness. We need to ensure that we arm our communities with information.
On the issue of waste management, we are working with our partners, Indalo Yethu, which does education awareness, and Buyisa-e-Bag. We have changed the focus. We are now saying Buyisa-e-Bag should operate in a way that creates employment - small, medium and micro enterprises, SMMEs - through collecting waste and recycling.
It is also important to change the mind-set, even if we only pick up litter and clean the streets. If we have not changed the mind-set of our people, those who come after us are going to litter. We therefore must change the mind-set of our people so that they see waste as wealth, waste as money, and that, as we clean our environment, we are going to have a healthy society.
In addition, we will not have achieved cleaning the environment if we do not clean our air and we ignore cleaning up the pollution in our townships. At the moment we are rolling out the Clean Fires campaign, the Basa njengo Magogo programme, because we believe that even if industries clean the air, we still have a lot of smoke in our townships. Because we are dependent on coal, we will not have won our war; so, as we roll out the campaign in your areas, please join us in cleaning the air.
Coming to the issue of waste management again, we will be taking a draft policy on basic refuse removal to Cabinet. It seeks to extend the provision of basic refuse removal services to indigent families in our country. We have not only done this, but we have even gone as far as doing cross-border cleanups with countries that border ours. We have been cleaning with them.