Stellenbosch has less than a month of water, and the DA is to blame

In 1999, the last generation of elder engineers in Eskom wrote in their last report that the country would face blackouts by 2007 if the state didn’t immediately commission more power plants. And just a few months after the date they predicted, sure enough, loadshedding descended on the country, a phenomenon set to return despite skyrocketing electrical costs nominally for the purpose of expanding the infrastructure.

But it isn’t just the ANC who have wrecked vital infrastructure. The DA have systematically destroyed the water systems in Knysna and Stellenbosch. In the case of Knysna, they employed the ANC Mayor Eleanore Bouw-Spies to run their government when they ran in 2011. This preserved a crooked patronage network centred around a local company called Knysna Tourism, now the local business chamber, which took R4m-R6m a year in illegal grant-in-aid funds from the local government, Triggering the founding of local anti-corruption party KIM – the Knysna Independent Movement.

The ANC admin had already recognised the need for more water in 2009, and commissioned a desalination plant that was delayed before eventually being mothballed in 2017. New dam storage was not connected, and now that the DA has lost the municipality, they have learned to scapegoat the ANC coalition which, as reprehensible as their corruption is, cannot be solely blamed for the situation there.

But Knysna isn’t even the worst case of neglect and ineffective staff quality control.

A recent photo of Ida’s Valley reservoir, completely dry due to failure to pump water during the wet season

In Stellenbosch, recently expelled water systems engineers (there aren’t any more water systems engineers employed at the municipality) have pointed out that the town has at most 40 days of water left. Today, we received information that that figure could be as low as seven days. These figures could not be confirmed by internal documents, but in context there is reason to believe that the crisis could be as severe.

While several local dam levels seem healthy, specific key sources feeding Stellenbosch are disconnected, and municipal water sources lack monitoring equipment due to neglect, meaning no figures are available for independent verification

Residents on facebook have complained about falling water pressure, and the municipality has had to issue warnings to cease using system water for anything beyond essentials.

The crisis – how the water system works (or doesn’t)

This is due to two things – refusing to allow engineering teams to fix water pipes, mothballing essential upgrading projects, and refusing to pump water into the storage dams during the wet season.

The core failures began after the 2018/2019 drought, when advanced real-time monitoring and modelling systems (allowing oversight of supply from Franschhoek and Klapmuts) were allowed to lapse into disrepair, with vital expansions cancelled or postponed indefinitely. Equipment was not replaced or maintained, supply-chain contracts for the water system expired and were not renewed, and telemetry systems for pump stations and reservoir levels have been non-functional for four years. This has left operators unable to monitor or respond effectively, effectively leaving technical staff flying blind.

Stellenbosch Municipality’s potable water system combines local municipal sources with bulk supplies from the Western Cape Water Supply System (WCWSS), managed mainly by the City of Cape Town. The WCWSS historically supplied up to two-thirds of the water, primarily from Theewaterskloof Dam via tunnels and pipelines, with additional contributions from Wemmershoek Dam.

But these sources must also feed the whole of Cape Town, and Stellenbosch increasingly relies on its own sources. Local sources, centred on the Idas Valley Dams in the Jonkershoek catchment, provide a vital buffer during restrictions, fed by the Eersterivier with abstraction rights of about 7.224 million m³/year. Raw water is treated at two main plants: Paradyskloof Water Treatment Works, which handles the bulk WCWSS supply with recent energy-efficiency upgrades, and Idas Valley Water Treatment Works, a slow sand filtration plant with roughly 28 Ml/day capacity serving local sources. Treated water flows to reservoirs such as Roosendal and is distributed through a zoned reticulation network to Stellenbosch town, Kayamandi, Franschhoek, Klapmuts, and other areas, with interconnecting pipelines allowing flexibility between Paradyskloof and Idas Valley zones.

The system remains heavily reliant on seasonal pumping into storage and WCWhntSS allocations. Augmentation efforts include new boreholes, reuse initiatives, and alternative connections like the Koelenhof/Wemmershoek line and potentially a Blackheath tie-in.

But Stellenbosch itself has two main storage dams (Idas Valley 1 and 2). Primary raw water comes from the Theewaterskloof scheme via a tunnel outlet near Blaauwklippen, feeding the Paradyskloof treatment works, from where it is pumped uphill to the Roosendal reservoir in town; a process that requires advance preparation. A secondary source is the Eersterivier from the Jonkershoek catchment, which feeds the Idas Valley dams. As river flows declined, the municipality simply drew down stored dam water rather than building new capacity.

Demand spikes sharply in summer when university students return, something planners anticipated years ago would require additional storage and supply augmentation. Several projects remain incomplete: a link from the new Skilpadvlei reservoir to Papegaaiberg; bulk supply lines from Koelenhof (using City of Cape Town’s Wemmershoek pipeline) to Khayamandi; and an alternative from Blackheath.

The Skilpadvlei reservoir itself is built but not yet connected to sources. Delays are attributed to staff shortages, budget constraints, and slow decision-making. Deon Louw has been appointed acting head of water services, but he is an electrical engineer, not a water systems engineer, making him unfamiliar with the system, and reliant on former colleagues to assist with basic issues, who are most certainly not being compensated for their vital consultation work.

Standard best practices in municipal water management (drawn from guidelines like those of the Department of Water and Sanitation, international bodies such as the IWA, and successful South African responses to the 2017–2019 Western Cape drought) include:

• Real-time monitoring and telemetry (SCADA systems): Essential for tracking reservoir levels, pump performance, flows, and leaks. This enables proactive scheduling and rapid response. Four years without functional telemetry is a major failure—operators are essentially “flying blind.”
• Seasonal pumping and storage management: Reservoirs should be aggressively refilled during winter/high-rainfall periods to buffer summer peaks. Reactive draw-down without augmentation is unsustainable.
• Proactive infrastructure planning and execution: Demand forecasting (e.g., for seasonal student influx) should drive timely completion of storage and bulk-supply projects. Delays due to unsigned contracts or budget decisions violate basic project governance.
• Qualified staffing and succession planning: Water systems require professional engineers (Pr Eng or equivalent), not just technologists or technicians. High vacancies and loss of institutional knowledge are red flags.
• Maintenance contracts and supply-chain resilience: Critical systems must have active service contracts; allowing them to lapse risks total breakdown.

All of these practices are disregarded.

Constructive dismissal strategy

Several former employees have been highly critical of how the system is currently managed, though unfortunately all of them wish to remain anonymous. They highlighted severe staffing shortages, including 13 unfilled technical vacancies, and noted that the last qualified engineer was forced out of the municipality the previous year.

This was part of a campaign against the white employees of the state perpetrated by Alex Kannemeyer with the knowledge of the Municipal Manager – video from a 2023 council meeting was leaked to us at the end of last year (pt 1, pt 2), in which Kannemeyer explained that he intends to get rid of all white engineers in the municipality, mainly through harassment and obstruction of their duties, to force them to resign, an illegal workplace practice known as constructive dismissal.

According to several former employees, Kannemeyer and human resources officer Lucretia Koegelenberg are alleged to have manipulated most recruitment processes. The ones in Water and Wastewater Services were blocked or slowed with any one or combination of the following:

• Delaying job postings for months after the department had clearly stated urgent need;
• Delaying shortlist discussion meetings for months
• Adding or attempting to add non-qualifying applicants to the shortlist
• Changing the job posting’s minimum requirements after all parties (Department, Director, trade unions and MM) signed off on them, and then halting the recruitment process when candidates didn’t meet doctored requirements, then taking more months to readvertise;
• refusing to accept the panel’s ruling on appointments, with Mettler routinely endorsing Kannemeyer’s recommendations against recommendations
• being openly hostile to the qualifications-ranked candidate during offer negotiations,
• lying to candidates during interviews – specifically on what is expected of them after appointment.

Unspent budget, neglected infrastructure

But when it comes to infrastructure, the neglect is easy to see in budget items. We include screenshots of the water systems tenders since 2022, and the available capex budget reviews for those years below the article.

Urgent upgrades to the Idas Valley storage system have been tendered but have zero committed funds for the past several years in the capital expenditure budget reviews. The same or similar goes for major pipeline maintenance and upgrading of monitoring and telemetry.

Several of these items were tendered for, but from the capital expenditure budget reviews it is clear that no money was committed, or when it was, just a few percentage points show up, even in the “committed” column (less in the spent column).

But the worst is just the most basic operational functionality – filling the dams. Most don’t think about these issues, but the dams have to be pumped full during the wet season in preparation for summer. Pumps must be operated on a disciplined schedule to refill storage reservoirs in advance of peak summer demand.

The Spier dam, for example, is currently empty and contributes nothing to the system because it actually remains unconnected.

According to one former technical staffer, Municipal Manager Geraldine Mettler refused to sign the necessary contract for this connection, citing “cost-saving” as a reason, a ludicrous premise given the importance of drinking water, which trumps every conceivable municipal concern. The Klapmuts bulk water works tender was also cancelled in 2023, and the Skilpadvlei Reservoir and its tributary Papegaaiberg Link have gone down due to another cancelled tender. These connections are necessary to provide additional storage and feed into town network, relieving Idas Valley/Paradyskloof.

It doesn’t hurt that the CFO Kevin Carolus is Mettler’s cousin. Engineers report fraudulent manipulation of equipment maintenance supply request sheets: officials would delay, and then deny requests, and engineers, after requesting the supply sheets after the fact, would find that the requests had been change without their knowledge to appear unreasonable, giving grounds to deny vital equipment.

The municipality has hired Deon Louw, a retired electrical engineer was recently brought in to assist, but it had to be explained to him that water storage cannot be managed like electricity generation: it requires proactive pumping during periods of abundant rainfall.

Municipal officials have blamed recent fires for this depletion, but technical experts have pointed out that helicopter water-bombing operations would need hundreds of thousands of flights to remove a meaningful portion of the dam’s volume, making the claim mathematically impossible.

It is hard to tell whether this is deliberate sabotage aimed at undermining the DA-led municipality, given the known campaign to purge experienced (predominantly white) technicians, but the mayor is deeply uninformed about municipal operations, and the MM tightly controls access to technical staff.

According to insiders, the managerial staff have convinced the Mayor that the white technical staff are plotting against him, encouraging him to go along with their purge, despite the disastrous consequences.

Oversight

It has been common knowledge among local councillors and DA officials for years that the entire municipality has gone rogue. The systematic exclusion of councillor oversight has been brought to the attention of local caucus, Cogta minister Anton Bredell, and the party ExCo again and again. None have shown any interest in investigating any issues whatsoever.

But the DA have never had any interest in dealing with substantial issues, and as our work elsewhere has shown, they routinely make effort to cover up stories, including promoting corrupt and incompetent mayors to parliament to keep them quiet and cozy. And Stellenbosch has no shortage of scandals – from the crooked Botmaskop development, to  untendered privatisation of municipal parking, to the gatekeeping of permits to assist local business cartels. The issues are manifold, pervasive, and systemic.

But the DA are very concerned with public perceptions.

The Kannemeyer disciplinary hearing, held just a week after the 2023 video was leaked in September last year, concluded without any punitive measures, and Kannemeyer is still employed as Senior Manager of Human Resources, but defrayed the negative publicity by resigning as Acting Director of Corporate Services in September.

Back in 2023, the CCMA had already tried Kannemeyer and settled, confirming the racist constructive dismissal campaign, but council was kept in the dark while the municipality footed the bill for his for legal fees, which used emergency regulations to circumvent council oversight. All of this came out during the council disciplinary hearing, yet no steps have been taken

As we discovered, the senior management had created a closed system whereby they prohibited any access by elected officials to staff or information inside the department, and have been running an entirely unaccountable shadow government since roughly 2019, allegedly with the continued consultation of former mayor Gesie van Deventer, herself pushed out as a result of some of these ongoing issues.

Local disciplinary processes have had no result, and despite public opprobrium for the obviously illegal and morally reprehensible character of Kannemeyer and his colleagues’ behaviour, neither the party nor the council has done a damned thing, trying to keep things quiet until local elections are over. But in the past month, councillors have been tied up in special council meetings for grievances and fingerpointing, holding everything in the municipality up to deal with blossoming crises across the entire policy landscape.

The most recent complaint was that the entire wastewater works department is collapsing – the infrastructure has not been maintained at all since 2019. A complaint was filed by the MM on the 8^th of December last year, in an attempt to claim she was left uninformed, but this was not accepted by council (for good reason, in context). The historic Van der Stel sport grounds have been slated to be demolished for a soccer stadium, with a Carte Blanche special coming up in two weeks. A recent allegation concerning the Botmaskop development contained claims that environmental preservation had been deliberately hampered to create conditions for downgrading the habitat and allowing construction. Onderpapagaaiberg is overrun with land invaders, with flytipping and infrastructural damage being widely reported on.

If this is how the DA run things in their own back yard, one can only imagine what they are up to in national government – clearly, John Steenhuisen is no exception.

Appendix: Budget and tenders

The following is a list of tenders the municipality put out between 2022 and 2025. You can see here that several of the infrastructural items mentioned above are present:

The following are the water and wastewater services section of the Capital Expenditure reports for the year until October for each given year. You can see that in most cases, nothing has been spent on essential items:

2022 CapEx report

2023 CapEx report

2024 Capex report

2025 Capex report