City of Cape Town denies it’s facing an ocean ‘sewage calamity’

Gregg Oelofse, a coastal and environmental manager with the City of Cape Town, speaking on a panel at Daily Maverick’s The Gathering 2026 in Cape Town on Friday, 11 September, denied that the metro municipality was facing a “sewage calamity” in the surrounding ocean.

He noted that the City had to treat or dispose of nearly 60% of the water it supplied to residents, and that if such large volumes of water continued to be used and polluted at current volumes, then “we should not be surprised to find evidence of it in our natural environment” despite the city’s treatment measures.

“I’m not suggesting for a moment that it’s okay to find pollution in our environment,” he said.

But he added that residents also needed to be reminded that they relied on the environment to assimilate their waste streams, and that this capacity could not be exceeded.

He also denied claims that the City had adopted a policy to “deny, denigrate or deflect” criticism about ocean sewage pollution, or that its data on beach water quality was either inaccurate or not up to date at times.

“I object to the claim that we manipulate the data,” he said, also attributing some of the high sewage readings to periods of high rainfall.

Oelofse disputed moderator Pieter-Louis Myburgh’s complaint that Cape Town surfers in some areas were literally swimming in poo, noting that he was also a regular surfer.

“We have an extraordinary coastline… It’s not without problems… but for the vast majority of time it’s absolutely fantastic. There’s no reason not to surf or dive or swim. Go out and enjoy it.”

Failed systems

Also speaking on the panel, Neil Macleod, the former head of eThekwini’s water and sanitation department, called for a return to accountable and competent municipal water departments, but said finances were not the problem.

“There are so many reasons [for this situation], but money is not one of them,” he said.

One of the central reasons for the failures lay in how these departments were structured. Previously, he said, using Durban as an example, water was treated as a separate business entity, with clear management and accountability structures.

The officials now take decisions in multibillion-rand water business units that lack qualified personnel. In some cases, water board members or managers did not even have a matric certificate, he said.

“You will find a politician or an office bearer in a political party occupying a junior position [but] with the ability to tell the boss what to do... [They will say], ‘If you don’t do what I say, I will go the PEC or the REC’, threatening to get senior managers removed.

“So you have an official hierarchy and these unofficial things, and so you don’t have one person responsible at the top. [...] Vehicles don’t get fixed. [...] You phone the call centre and nobody answers”, so no one was blamed or held accountable.

The ‘big mistake’ in the 90s

Sean Phillips, the director-general of the national Department of Water and Sanitation, agreed with Macleod’s analysis of the structural failures at municipal level.

However, he also emphasised the vital importance of ring-fencing municipal water tariff revenue to finance and to maintain water infrastructure.

“Water is not paid for from income tax, VAT or company tax. It is paid for from [municipal] tariff revenue.”

One of the “big mistakes” made in the early 1990s, he suggested, was designing a municipal funding system which allowed revenue to be placed in a central pot, enabling municipalities to spend water tariff revenue on “other things”,  including clinics or libraries in some cases.

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So, because water revenue was no longer ring-fenced to properly fund water and wastewater treatment, the result was “a downward spiral” that included a lack of maintenance that resulted in water leaks and an increase in non-revenue water losses.

“We also need to ring-fence management functions,” he said, outlining proposed legal reforms to ensure ring-fenced water revenue and a system to license municipalities to ensure a minimum level of capability and – as a last resort – giving the national minister the authority to appoint an independent water services provider.

Myburgh interjected to ask why it had taken a “complete collapse” of the system before the government proposed legal reforms and other measure to remedy the situation?

Phillips responded that in a relatively young democracy such as South Africa, the founding parents of the new Constitution had perhaps not been able to anticipate certain problems or devise systems that would always work perfectly.

“We are now seeing some of the things that can be changed to make the system work better.”

On whether the central government should take charge of all water services, Phillips said it did not have to be the national government. For example, regional water service utilities could assume this function

“We are not looking at a situation where we deliver water services from Pretoria to every corner of the country.”

Instead, Phillips said that over time the government would hand back control to local authorities when adequate capacity was developed.

‘A spider web of corruption and mismanagement’

Ferrial Adam, executive director of the civil society WaterCAN group, said she believed it was a mistake to try to resolve the crisis in isolation or solely through an engineering lens.

Water was an integral part of society, central to alleviating poverty, education or health problems, but these problems were not being dealt with at ground level.

“This is a polycrisis, a spider web of corruption, of mismanagement and weak municipalities. But it’s also a systemic issue that needs fixing.”

Adam noted that many rural communities still relied on water from sewage-polluted streams. All they were asking for was to be provided with some safe tap water, even for just two or three days a week.

There were also problems in large cities. In Mangaung and other parts of Free State, “some people have blood worms in their water”.

In eThekwini, people in a large number of municipal wards were reliant on water tankers and were being forced into a situation of “fighting among themselves” because the tankers did not supply enough water

Referring to proposals in President Cyril Ramaphosa’s 16-page Water Action Plan for more investment and more involvement by the private sector, Adam said: “Your municipal functions can’t be hived off to the private sector.” DM