Day Zero, Cape Town - 7 years on.

2025-02-11 Episode 17 - Day Zero, Cape Town - 7 years on... (with Leonardo Manus, Exec Director, Water and Sanitation, Cape Town)
[00:00:00] Piers Clark: Welcome to the Exec Exchange, 15-minute podcast in which a leader from the water sector shares a story to inspire, inform, and engage with other water sector leaders around the world. My name is Piers Clark, and today my guest is Leonardo Manus, the Executive Director for Water and Sanitation at the City of Cape Town.
Now, regular listeners will know that a couple of weeks ago we heard from Mike Webster, who was in this role back in 2018 when Cape Town hit the day zero crisis and the conversation we're going have today with Leonardo is around what's it like running the city of Cape Town in the aftermath of day zero.
Leonardo, wonderful to have you with us.
[00:00:41] Leonardo Manus: Thank you very much, Piers. Good to be here. Appreciate it.
[00:00:44] Piers Clark: Now, I am right. You took over directly after Mike Webster. Is that correct?
[00:00:49] Leonardo Manus: That's correct. There was a few months gap between my recruitment and his departure, but I was the one appointed after him.
[00:00:55] Piers Clark: When was that?
[00:00:56] Leonardo Manus: I started in January '24. So, it's 13 months ago.
[00:01:00] Piers Clark: You're dealing with the post COVID impact as well as the post day zero impact, which we will be talking about. Let's go back a bit. What were you doing before you were in this role?
[00:01:10] Leonardo Manus: Before that I served in the Department of Water and Sanitation, which is a national department in South Africa, taking responsibility for all the water resources, as well as setting up our policy regulation standards. And I was a little bit of an all-rounder in that department. And for a long period of my life there, I've been responsible for the regulation of water and sanitation. And I also served on the World Health Organization's regulators network, which also exposed me to how other water utilities are being regulated across the world. That was where I came from in the first part.
[00:01:44] Piers Clark: How long have you been in Cape Town, in South Africa, working in the water sector?
[00:01:47] Leonardo Manus: I've actually been born in Cape Town. That's many years ago. But when I worked for National Department, I worked in Pretoria. As from Pretoria was my base, but Cape Town was very much part of my area of jurisdiction where I had to work. So, in the heart of day zero, I was responsible for the operations of the Western Cape water supply system, which was basically the biggest source and still is the current biggest source of which Cape Town is actually depending upon to get its water from.
So, during that time, that was right in the heart of 2018, the Theewaterskloof Dam, which is the biggest dam that we have in serving Cape Town was basically in its last 10%. But people called it dead water because it couldn't get to the tunnel inlet that's fed Cape Town. So, we came up with various innovative means of getting the water into the tunnel at that point in time. And it worked! And we used a very primitive way of pumping water, getting it to the tunnel and it worked pretty well for, I think, five days. And then it started raining. We were happy that it started raining, but we also, from an engineering perspective, were quite sad that we couldn't prove our innovation to being very effective.
[00:02:58] Piers Clark: It's funny because the description of those reservoirs and dams, Mike Webster gave us his perspective on those. But actually, if we go back a few previous podcasts, we had Dora Ross from Las Vegas talking about the dead pool exactly that scenario you've just described. The dead pool that's created in the Lake Mead, just outside of Las Vegas, as they hit the drought. It sounds like you really did hit dead pool.
[00:03:22] Leonardo Manus: We were definitely there. That dam, the basin of the dam, many pictures you will find online of it, it looked like a desert because basically the sand and the dust storms were in the basin of the dam at that stage.
[00:03:34] Piers Clark: For those people who aren't aware, just remind us how many people are in the Cape Town area? How many people are you responsible for the water and wastewater services?
[00:03:42] Leonardo Manus: In the vicinity of Cape Town, about four million people that we are actually looking at, and we are serving them all. Not all of them are living in the affluent areas and the nicer part of Cape Town. There's a quite an influx of people that came also in during the COVID time not having the best of income.
[00:04:03] Piers Clark: These are people coming from the rural areas into the city?
[00:04:06] Leonardo Manus: Correct. And some of them also lost their houses during the fact that they didn't have income over the COVID period. So, these are the really the vulnerable group that we're also looking after in the city of Cape Town. And that group also grew quite significantly. So, there will be various types of confluence of challenges that we really have to engineer around to ensure that we supply sustainable services, both water and sanitation services, to all of Capetonians and that is what we're doing to the best of our ability now.
[00:04:36] Piers Clark: If I remember correctly, there's a big proportion, it's 30 percent or something of the people you serve that get water for free because of their economic circumstances up to a particular level. Is that correct?
[00:04:47] Leonardo Manus: That is correct. We give 15 kiloliters of water free to those who are actually registered as indigent. But it also helps us to actually have a very good economic model to ensure that we don't carry a lot of debt. But if we become more sustainable in the way we are actually pricing, because actually nothing is free, you actually just have to shape your economic model, your financial model to such an extent that it making yourself sustainable.
And that is what the City of Cape Town's water and sanitation unit has done very well. To the extent we are unaccounted for water is still very high according to our own standards. But in terms of the South Africa standards is very low and on comparative levels. And that is what we are working actually to bring even further down. And that is where we actually had to get that funding model into that space.
[00:05:36] Piers Clark: So, give me some figures there. So, you're calling it unaccounted for water or non-revenue water. What's that percentage?
[00:05:42] Leonardo Manus: At this point in time, our non-revenue water ranges between 25 and 26 percent.
[00:05:47] Piers Clark: During day zero, you managed to get a 55 percent reduction in water use because the public was mobilized in terms of understanding that water was in incredibly short supply. Here you are eight years on what's the public mood and how much of that water saving sort of mentality is still pervading?
[00:06:07] Leonardo Manus: There has been a slowly upward trend in terms of the water consumption again, because of the luxury also of having water, but it has not resettled into the space where it has been before. Seven years on, in terms of day zero, and there has been an increment of people in Cape Town, but we have to reach the very much the same levels of use if you take the equivalence in terms of the growth and also the water use. People of Cape Town has learned the value of water. But it came also with some level of benefit but also came to the other part for the city as not so good because now we lost that ability to actually restrict water drastically as we've done during COVID time. Our capability to restrict has actually been constricted now because most of the people don't have these massive gardens that took a lot of water as they did before. They amended their ways of using water to a large extent and that we need to appreciate: that the people of Cape Town actually learned during this whole day zero.
[00:07:09] Piers Clark: Yeah, I get your point that you've got less leeway to do it. People have shifted to it, they aren't being profligate with their water, but it does mean that the expectation that in a crisis you could suddenly squeeze it down by 55%, that's just not going to be possible.
[00:07:22] Leonardo Manus: We need to actually take as a major risk going forward, that should we be facing another drought that we've faced in the period from 2016 to 2018, our capability to restrict ourself into a space that we've done before has now been constricted. So, we need to actually look at that space again. So, in this regard, what we need to do, we actually have to now get into the space of wastewater because that's a source of water. We now need to look at a space where we work on the social side of the business, where we got people to use less water. We now need to work on the other social side of getting people to trust the water. And in that trust, we also need now into the space of water reclamation or to reuse. We have to look at desalination. Projects is currently underway. We're spending capital in it, but whilst it cannot only be an engineering or technical solution, we need to depend on people's ability to actually accept what we are working on to their benefit. And there, the element of trust is the highest part that we're working on.
[00:08:22] Piers Clark: Let's talk about some of the other competing challenges that you've got to deal with.
[00:08:26] Leonardo Manus: We also have to look at our wastewater treatment works. Now in Cape Town, . In Cape Town we have a phenomenon called the Cape Flats because geographically or topographically it is very flat. To ensure that when the toilets are flushing in those areas there's a lot of pump stations that you have to keep on pumping. And you also have to get this wastewater to a wastewater treatment works that is now being upgraded with more people that's coming in and to that standard. So, you have to balance in terms of investments you're making to bring in new water resources and also wastewater. But the investment in wastewater is not an investment to treat waste, it's an investment to actually treat your wastewater to an extent where it can become a water resource again. And we've successfully invested in the Zandvliet wastewater treatment works and the quality of that effluent is excellent. To the extent where we're just going to reroute it back to our water treatment, and it will be reclaimed water that we can be using it again. But 5 percent of our wastewater in Cape Town is being discharged through marine sewer outflows, and there's an element in terms of the environmentalists or activists in that space which demands that capital should be rerouted in that space. Not everything is always affordable. So, we have to do tradeoffs.
[00:09:57] Piers Clark: I'm detecting that you see that 5 percent that goes to the marine environment as wasted, don't you? You'd like that to be coming back into your water supply.
[00:10:04] Leonardo Manus: We'd like to actually do that as well. However, due to the topography in Cape Town, we have a mountain in between, so those outfalls on the other side of the mountain, actually prevent us from making it economically viable to actually bring it back. So, we just need to make sure that we waterproof ourselves for the next 15 years or beyond that, taking consideration of all the elements of the water business, including the sanitation part that we can sustain ourselves as we go forward.
[00:10:31] Piers Clark: You're not going to be without challenges, are you, Leonardo?
[00:10:34] Leonardo Manus: Not at all. What is engineering without challenges, eh?
[00:10:37] Piers Clark: I get that. And actually, I want to, we're going to finish now, but I'm going to take you back 30 years to when you were a young engineer working in civil service department of Cape Town. If you could go back, what advice would you give young Leonardo Manus?
[00:10:51] Leonardo Manus: In those days, we focused a lot on the engineering of new infrastructure. We came out of a time when we moved into a new democracy and we believed, as a country, that we had to get everybody serviced and new infrastructure built. The element that I would have focused on as a young engineer more was to invest in terms of how we sustain what we have first before we actually add more. But also, to invest in the robust nature of technologies that could work, especially in the rural areas around Cape Town as well in the rest of South Africa.
And perhaps I would have worked in local government first before I went to work for a regulator because you definitely see things differently when you work for a water utility. And I think regulators can learn from that, that they should actually understand the challenges at the level of water utility, before they actually make those regulations that sometimes are very difficult to implement or very costly to implement for that matter.
[00:11:50] Piers Clark: I love that you've given something for everyone there. So the reason I asked that question is because there's lots of listeners who are at the earlier stages in their career, who look to the leaders in the water sector and go how did you get there? And what do I need to know now?
And you've given some brilliant advice about, it's not just about shiny new things. It's about understanding where you're coming from. It's not just about being inside your organization, whether you're in a local authority or in a local government or in a regulator, it's about "wear someone else's shoes so you get a different perspective." Leonardo, thank you for your time.
[00:12:18] Leonardo Manus: It's my pleasure. Thank you very much, Piers.
[00:12:20] Piers Clark: You have been listening to the Exec Exchange with Piers Clark. My guest today has been Leonardo Manus, the Executive Director for Water and Sanitation at the City of Cape Town.
Thank you very much. Join us next time.