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Water shortages are due to management, not sabotage

http://www.bdlive.co.za/opinion/2014/10/17/water-shortages-are-due-to-management-not-sabotage

by Rolfe Eberhard, October 17 2014, 06:03

Rolfe Eberhard

THE risks underlying the recent water shortages in Gauteng are much more serious than the official spokespeople would have us believe. Sound solutions can be implemented only if we properly understand the causes. The answers lie in a proper appreciation and valuation of the engineering skills necessary to plan, design, operate and maintain complex water systems.

The recent lack of water came as a shock to many residents in Gauteng.

It is much more inconvenient (not to mention smelly and unhealthy) to be without water than electricity.

It was also shocking because our institutions responsible for water in Gauteng pride themselves in being world class and we believed them.

Rand Water’s annual report proudly states that its distinct brand is “familiar and respected” in SA and is recognised internationally. It further claims that its “reputation for expertise and technical excellence” is its principal marketing vehicle.

The cause of the water shortage has been variously attributed to the work of thieves, a technical glitch or an unfortunate constellation of events.

These explanations are inadequate and do not lead us to the right conclusions. Nor do they point to appropriate solutions.

The water supplied to most of Gauteng must be pumped 50km and lifted 300m to the top of the Witwatersrand.

The reliability of the supply is thus dependent on dependable electricity, transformers and pumps. Redundancy is built into the design. The robustness of the system is evident in the fact that water has been reliably supplied to residents and businesses in the past few years, notwithstanding numerous episodes of load-shedding, and for decades before that.

But when the water supply fails in the way it did recently, it is the result of a systems failure. This is not an accident — the system is designed to be robust to accidents.

South African Institution of Civil Engineering vice-president Chris Herold has noted that three of Rand Water’s four main booster pump stations failed, along with one of the two primary pump stations.

These multiple, though fortunately non-simultaneous, failures mean that the engineering protocols were breached or flawed.

This is fundamentally a management problem — a failure to ensure that the system is planned, operated and maintained in a way that ensures the security of the system.

The managers at Rand Water are unlikely to act in this way on purpose.

How and why did this happen? There are at least two important contributing causes, which are interrelated.

First, the number of professional engineers in senior management positions and the total years of professional engineering experience have declined significantly in Rand Water over the past 15 years.

Consequently, the management team at Rand Water, as a collective, now has a much less comprehensive and deep appreciation of the detailed engineering aspects of the business than was the case in earlier years and this will inevitably affect the quality of technical decision making in the organisation.

Second, the procurement rules for contracting engineering consultants have changed over the past few years at the very time when Rand Water is more reliant on external engineering inputs.

Many tenders now involve a two-step process in which the technical qualification of the bidder plays a relatively small part.

The final award is often based solely on the second step, decided exclusively on price and black economic empowerment points. The intention is to encourage emerging black businesses to gain a foothold in a white-dominated engineering industry.

Progress on this important objective is being achieved. However, the system creates perverse incentives to lower the technical quality of the bid and, ironically, does not support the development of excellent black service providers.

In the words of a professional in the business: “A 60% limit for the technical score can often be achieved by just about anyone who repeats the wording given in the tender and once 60% (or in some cases 70%) is achieved, it makes no difference if a bidder achieves 99% or the lower limit for their technical score as they both go through and the cheapest bid will usually win.”

The combination of these two factors is a dangerous and risky cocktail: a procurement system that is not underpinned with the requisite professional engineering experience inside the organisation, combined with an incentive system that encourages the tenderer to cut technical corners in order to save on price.

If there is any truth in this, and I am reliably informed that there is, we indeed have cause for concern.

There is evidence, for example, that Rand Water was aware of problems with some key items of equipment more than a year ago that have not yet been remedied and may have contributed to the Gauteng failures.

This leads to the impression that there seems to have been a lack of urgency in attending to known problems and an inadequate appreciation of the risks involved. The handling of the crisis, when it did occur, also was not professional.

National Planning Commissioner Mike Muller has already pointed out that communications were poor and inaccurate, the response was slow, a joint operating command was not set up early in the process and there was an evident lack of contingency planning. And Justice Malala noted in The Times on September 30: “One of the most extraordinary things I heard was a spokesman on 702 saying the crisis would be resolved ‘in one, maybe two days’. He did not know. Worse, he had not even bothered to know.” This situation is a far cry from the excellence proudly espoused by Rand Water in its annual report.

What is to be done?

There are three interventions that will make a difference. The first is to change the procurement system to ensure that more robust technical requirements are met for all contracts requiring engineering services.

The second is to introduce minimum technical qualifications and experience requirements for people responsible to manage and oversee water supply and wastewater systems.

Third, a national management program specifically designed for the managers of water systems needs to be introduced. A safe and reliable supply of drinking water is fundamentally dependent on the quality of the management applied.

And the quality of management is entirely dependent on the quality of the people doing the managing — their technical competence, their experience and their ability to lead.

We have failed to pay enough attention to the development of the necessary technical and management skills to manage our water systems sustainably.

We assumed our most prestigious institutions were safe. But the recent water crisis has shown that we were wrong. Failure to attach due importance to the technical competence and quality of our emerging management cadre will inevitably result in failure to deliver services safely and reliably.

We know this for a fact in Makana municipality in the Eastern Cape. More serious water supply failures in Gauteng are unimaginable. Or are they? Can we take the risk?

• Eberhard is an independent public policy professional