News that the eThekwini Municipality has hired an experienced engineer to reduce non-revenue water losses (The Mercury, April 23) raises several questions.
On July 24, 2023, The Mercury reported that the municipality had made “an impassioned call” for retired engineers to rejoin the Water and Sanitation unit to assist with the management of its infrastructure and the training of future engineers.
In that some of those engineers most likely took early retirement because their path to promotion was closed off by so-called transformation – meaning racial quotas – suggests that a void in experience and expertise was deliberately created in fulfilment of racial ideology.
Even if that was not entirely the case, it means that institutional memory was willfully discarded. Yet the media release by the municipality expressed hope that the retired engineers could provide “skills transfer and mentorship.” Again, that request proves that in their haste to impose racial quotas, the ANC had no plan B to address the absence of skills, which instead were superseded as a priority by ideology.
By 2023, Durban’s water loss had risen to 56,2%, having increased from 36.85% in 2017/18, according to the Office of the Auditor-General (The Mercury, February 1, 2023). That raises the question: why was nothing done until July 2023, when, in desperation, an appeal was made for retired engineers to come on board to reverse water losses?
Now three years later, with water losses costing R4,9 billion, what happened to the retired engineers project? The answer is not inspiring, which means that ANC ideology has no solutions for the crises it creates.
So now a single engineer, Vishal Poona, has been hired to try to fix the mess that ideology created. One sympathises with him because his task is insurmountable. In the first place, he has to deal with the head of Water and Sanitation, Ednick Msweli, who surely has proved incapable of addressing and averting the crisis that has developed. How did he get the position in the first place? Why was that not obvious back in 2023?
If any of the retired engineers responded to the 2023 recall, what they encountered is exactly what Vishal Poona will confront: the rot of cadre deployment, which is politically impossible to uproot or to persuade to do the jobs they were never qualified to hold in the first place.
The only advice to Vishal Poona is to ensure he is equipped with a repeat prescription of Prozac.
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