The Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs, Mrs Edna Molewa has approved the establishment of nine Catchment Management Agencies (CMAs) in South Africa. The CMAs will play a critical role in managing the country’s scarce water resources, including facilitating stakeholder input into the management of water resources.
This decision has been widely welcomed by the water sector and has been hailed as further evidence of the department’s commitment to ensuring the full implementation of the National Water Act and to maintaining the sustainable use of the nation’s water resources in line with the national development imperatives of government.
The delegation of water management functions to the catchment level has only been partially implemented since the promulgation of the National Water Act in 1998.
The Minister decided to reduce the number of CMAs to nine from the original proposal of 19 CMAs. This is due to a number of reasons including the technical capacity required to staff CMAs, and the challenges such a large number of institutions poses to the Department of Water Affairs (DWA) in regulating their performance.
The water management area boundaries still need to be formally amended through the second edition of the National Water Resources Strategy. The proposed amendments to the boundaries will be published for public comment, the participation of the public and water users in particular will enable the department to make the necessary amendments to the proposed boundaries before they are finally gazetted.
Once the boundaries have been formally gazetted, DWA will launch a national programme for the establishment of the remaining CMAs. This programme will ensure that stakeholders in the various water management areas are engaged in the process of establishing the CMAs, in line with the government’s commitment to the democratisation of water management in the country.
In the programme, the existing CMAs in the Inkomati and the Breede-Overberg water management areas will receive the first priority and be realigned into the Inkomati-Usuthu and the Breede-Gouritz CMAs respectively. This will be followed by the establishment of CMAs in the Limpopo, Vaal, and Phongola/Umzimkulu water management areas.
Figure 1 gives a presentation of the new boundaries of CMAs and corresponding WMAs
After this pronouncement, there are other five remaining sets of water sector institutions whose alignment is still to be completed, namely regional water utilities, water user associations, Water Research Commission and the management of the national water resource infrastructure.
It is anticipated that the Minister will make further pronouncement on the future of these institutions in the new financial year of 2012/13, probably before the end of June 2012, which is the end of the IRR Project term. At that time, the department will have a strategy in place to realise the vision of the new institutional landscape of South Africa.
Contact:
Themba Khumalo
Cell: 082 802 3432
Linda Page
Cell: 083 460 4482
