Imagine:
- Telling your B&B guests that you can offer them a cupful of water in the morning for making tea and rinsing after brushing their teeth. If they want more, there is a charge for bottled water.
- Shutting down your paving or construction or landscaping business because your customers won’t let you use their hosepipes, or their outside taps simply have no water.
- Closing your business and retrenching staff because not only is there no water for critical business processes, but also no water for ablution facilities to meet employees’ basic human needs and workplace rights.
This might sound like scare tactics. You’ve heard it all before, yet water continues to flow out of the taps, so why bother or be concerned?
Nelson Mandela Bay’s water supply is now in its most dire state ever. Current demand exceeds available supply, and at the current rate of consumption, the dams will be completely depleted by July and a third of the metro will have no water.
Not enough people in Nelson Mandela Bay are taking the water crisis seriously enough.
We support Executive Mayor Retief Odendaal’s appeal to all businesses to cut water consumption by 20%, immediately and urgently.
The metro in turn intends to force demand down by limiting extraction from the dams in the interim. The Mayor has advised us that this will result in some areas of the metro being without water on any given day – far from ideal but a preferable alternative to a third of the Bay being without water indefinitely.
Loadshedding is tough, but trying to run our businesses and homes with NO water is going to be even tougher. Regular water outages and “water shedding” will become the norm very soon unless we all take action now.
Water is an essential and scarce commodity. We all need to change our attitudes to water and make water-saving a way of life – starting today.
We need to accept that we live in a water-scarce area. And we need to understand that the water from the Gariep Dam via the Nooitgedacht treatment works is not enough to meet the current demand of the entire metro. This will only be possible if we all reduce our water consumption.
We welcome the drought mitigation and water augmentation initiatives underway by the municipality and the Department of Water and Sanitation. These are already making a positive impact, but we need to take responsibility too as consumers to reduce consumption so that these measures can work effectively.
I appeal to each and every Chamber member to play their part, at home and in your businesses to stave off this crisis.
- There are numerous cost-effective ways to cut water use, re-use and recycle and to harvest rainwater. Information on how to do it is widely available, including the municipality website at https://www.nelsonmandelabay.gov.za/page/drought-mitigation-plans-and-projects
- Big business solutions can be scaled down for small business. Members of the Chamber’s water task team are willing to share information and advice with other businesses – contact the Chamber for more information and support.
- Educate staff and raise awareness of the need for water saving in shared facilities such as ablutions, laundries and kitchens.
- To the shopping centres, retailers, restaurants and accommodation establishments – educate guests and staff on saving water, post signs to raise awareness of the crisis and appeal for support in saving water, share information on what you’re doing to encourage guests to do the same.
Every drop really does count.
We are in a crisis. Now is not the time to look into the past and assign blame. Now is the time for us all to act together to save our shared water supply immediately, and start building a water-resilience for the future.
Loyiso Dotwana
President: Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber