Daily Maverick reports (February 8) the City of Cape Town is spending almost R12 million on the Visserhok Leachate Treatment Plant that's been out of commission for six years. "Since 2017, the municipality has been spending R3 million a year on repairs and maintenance of the plant - with no benefit to the city."
The city denied it's wasteful spending.
This reminds of my estimate of R60 million-plus a year on Cape Town Stadium's upkeep. I identified other examples of fruitless and wasteful spending, but there would be more, adding up. Perhaps readers could suggest other examples.
1. The several million - R30 million-plus? - on the supply network of treated water from Athlone Sewerage Plant to irrigate parks and sports fields (2018-2021) that was never commissioned. A Parks manager told me "there was no money (sic)" for the the on-site - parks etc - irrigation, which was odd because all that smaller parks need are hose pipes and already employed park attendants. Later, he said the delay in commissioning was because the "water quality was not good", but someone in the know told me it was fine.
In the meantime, sports fields - Turfhall etc - are being patchily irrigated from mains water or, like parks and verges, not at all. Some are almost dust bowls, which considering the wastewater irrigation infrastructure is available, is lunatic.
2. Landscaping and laying irrigation piping along Jan Smuts Drive up to Govan Mbeki Road in 2021 (part of the MyCiti Cape Flats road project). Irrigation was never turned on. Within six months everything except a few hardy trees died and alien vegetation like Port Jackson grew which had to be removed. All together, we're talking a few million of wasteful expenditure.
For example, landscaping a 150m section alone adjacent Turfhall Sports Field was futile. The cost, by my estimate, was over R200 000, half that for heavy equipment. According to the landscaping and main contractor, they told the city "landscaping" here was ill-advised (I did too) - good, healthy greenery was ripped up and replaced with ground cover inappropriate for this site.
3. The Environmental Management Department's invasive species house crow programme, performed by contractor. At a site near where I live, the contractor's workers allegedly indiscriminately cleared - "oiling" - house crows' nests and indigenous pied crows' nests.
The acting manager for the invasive species unit (their website has a baboon hotline, apparently baboons are invasive too) agreed with me that during initial assessment of targeted nesting sites, done from the ground over only an hour or two, they could not distinguish house crow nests from other, indigenous species'.
Therefore, the work, which is ongoing, is a blind assessment of what invasive species might be present, not what actually is there. Also, he acknowledged that generally non-targeted (indigenous) species are collateral damage to the house crow clearing although he claimed care was taken not to disturb them, which I did not believe.
The wasteful expenditure is that he agreed the same house crow nesting pairs shall probably return to cleared sites and nest again, or move to other sites (the city does not know about), and allegedly be a nuisance there. So the exercise is fruitless and wasteful because to be effective it must be done two or three times each breeding season at every site to prevent nesting and numbers increasing, not counting in-migration of new, unaccounted for individuals. I don't know the value of the contract but in the long run it's expensive and futile in terms of expected outcomes.
These and other examples including MyCiti show the DA-run city, while largely well-managed, is not all the DA and its supporters make it out to be.
Comments
Post a Comment