Pretoria - The signing of a memorandum of understanding between the City of Tshwane and Danish city of Aarhus will see the metro exploiting the technical expertise of its counterpart in order to improve the management of water, especially in the Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant.
This was the sentiment expressed by mayor Cilliers Brink and his Danish counterpart Jacob Bundsgaard during a media briefing at Tshwane House where they signed the memorandum of understanding.
Brink said the partnership was not just about sourcing development funding for Rooiwal upgrades but also about how the municipality can use the best expertise and improve water management.
The formalisation of partnership comes after the City in May announced that a staggering R33 million would be injected into a three-year project in collaboration between Tshwane and Aarhus aimed to help improve the Tshwane’s capacity to manage its water resources.
Part of the deal would afford the city a chance to learn from its counterpart metropolitan city about water resource security and management.
The project, it was said, could potentially assist in addressing water challenges in areas such as Hammanskraal and other parts of the Tshwane metro.
Bundsgaard said: “We have some issues of contamination of groundwater. All our drinking water is produced from groundwater. We have programmes that deal with pollution of groundwater from certain kinds of chemicals but mostly we have very safe drinking water in Denmark.”
He stressed that treating wastewater was of importance for any city, adding that the partnership would also focus on sharing expertise “in order for both to have the efficient operation of the treatment of the water”.
He said co-operation between two cities would make sure that they can transfer the knowledge, technology and management experience.
Brink said: “Wastewater is one of the work teams in our partnership. Although I will be very careful to say this is going to solve the problem. We have said one of the issues that we do have is a problem of poor standard operating procedures but we also have the funding gap in the upgrade of Rooiwal wastewater treatment plant.”
He added that the city understood the frustration of the people of Hammanskraal who for so many years have “suffered the consequences of Rooiwal not operating as it should”.
“Although Rooiwal is in the worst condition of our waste-water treatment plants, the fact is many of the plants and infrastructure are also decaying,” Brink said.
For years the problem of dirty water supplied to Hammanskraal residents has been attributed to lack of capacity of Rooiwal plant to purify waste water, resulting in the sludge being discharged into the Apies River.
The Apies River in turn supplied water to the Temba water treatment plant, used for purifying water for the Hammanskraal residents.
The partnership between the two cities was sealed a week after President Cyril Ramaphosa signed a proclamation authorising the Special Investigating Unit (SIU) to investigate allegations of maladministration and corruption in the R295 million tender to upgrade of Rooiwal plant.
The tender for a Phase 1 construction was awarded in October 2019 to a joint venture of CMS Water Projects and NJR Projects linked to a controversial businessman, Edwin Sodi.
It is hoped that the SIU probe will unveil the depths of corruption and political patronage networks in the City of Tshwane.
Pretoria News