City of Cape Town says Zeekoevlei dredging will begin this June
The City of Cape Town's Spatial Planning and Environment Directorate has announced that the dredging of the Zeekoevlei waterbody will kick off in June 2025.
According to the City, over the past decades, there has been a large build-up of sediment and nutrient rich organics in the Zeekoevlei lakebed that has resulted in algal blooms, which has negatively impacted the overall health of the vlei and its water quality for recreational users.
The project team have already made great progress with the preparations for the dredging, which will take about two years as part of the City's efforts in improving the water quality of the waterbody.
Cape Town's Deputy Mayor and Mayoral Committee Member for Spatial Planning and Environment, Alderman Eddie Andrews said that the dredging would likely begin by the middle of next month.
'If all goes as planned, and inclement weather does not cause any delays, residents and visitors to the reserve will see the dredger doing its job by mid-June, if not sooner,' Alderman Andrews revealed.
Dredging is the process of removing sediment, debris, and other materials from the bottom of water bodies such as rivers, lakes, harbours, and oceans. The process is done using specialised equipment like dredgers to deepen waterways, maintain navigation channels, prevent flooding, or reclaim land. Dredging is also commonly used in port maintenance, environmental cleanups, and construction projects.
The City said that two sections of Zeekoevlei will be dredged over a period of 26 months, first Storm Bay and thereafter the contractor will move to the section known as Home Bay.
The dredged material will then be pumped with a slurry pipeline from Zeekoevlei to dewatering ponds where the sediment can dry out.
Residents and visitors should expect a lot of activity in these areas where the contractor will be busy, and should be aware of the following: The work will happen from Monday to Saturday, but work may also be scheduled for public holidays and Sundays when absolutely necessary.
There may also be noise during working hours, and the dredging process will release an odour as organic material and sediment are disturbed.
Recreational users will have access to Zeekoevlei for rowing and sailing, but certain sections will be closed in the interest of safety.
The public will have access to Zeekoevlei, including for bird watching, but certain sections of the False Bay Nature Reserve will be restricted while the work is happening. Do you think any other waterbody in Cape Town or South Africa needs to be dredged?
Let us know by leaving a comment below, or send a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1.
Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Daily Maverick
21 hours ago
- Daily Maverick
Coal mining fear sparks unexpected conservation boom in Mpumalanga
The ecologically rich grasslands in Mpumalanga's highveld have become a front line in the struggle between biodiversity and coal mining. Fearful of open-cast mining's devastating impacts, a growing number of South African landowners are turning to an unconventional shield: biodiversity protection. While their motives may not be entirely green, the outcome has been, in the words of Brian Morris, 'a blessing in disguise' for conservation and South Africa's biodiversity conservation goals. Morris heads the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency's biodiversity stewardship programme, which allows for the declaration of 'protected areas on land owned by private individuals, by communities, by companies and trusts'. Unconventional shield These landowners commit to 'long-term commitments to essentially manage these areas as private protected areas.' Crucially, when formal protected areas are declared, they are legally protected from mining developments. This makes them an effective defence against open-cast coal mining, which 'is steadily eating away vast tracts of conservation-worthy grasslands', said Morris. Notably, these grasslands hold high biodiversity value, but also happen to be where 'most of the mineral reserves, the coal, and so on' are located, said Morris. He said this 'inevitable conflict' was a microcosm of a larger national struggle. Conservation, he said, had often been 'cast as an elitist luxury, something that gets in the way of jobs and housing and food production and other needs'. In this context, the Mpumalanga Parks' initiative — even with its mixed motivations — offers a practical path toward a 'more inclusive and more holistic vision and implementation' of conservation, one that recognises that 'land holds multiple values — ecological, economic, spiritual — and that these values can coexist', said Morris. Morris was talking at the latest Tipping Points webinar, titled Conservation beyond Borders. Hosted by Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation (OGRC), the webinar tackled a pressing global question: How can countries such as South Africa protect biodiversity without sidelining development and human rights? Joining Morris on the panel were environmental historian and conservation biographer, Simon Pooley, and Natasha Wilson, the South African National Park's expansion manager. The discussions were facilitated by Kina Murphy, the chief scientist and Africa director for the Campaign for Nature, which focuses on protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 — a goal set as a key conservation benchmark at the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2022 in Montreal, Canada. Murphy highlighted the urgency of the task. With up to two million species at risk of extinction this decade, she stressed that new, inclusive models of conservation were essential. South Africa, which helped shape the goal during the negotiations, has committed to protect 1.4 million hectares through formal reserves and another 10 million via so-called OECMs (Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures). These include community and privately managed lands that support biodiversity, even if not primarily for that purpose. There was consensus among the panellists that while these goals were laudable, turning that vision into reality was anything but simple. The obstacles are many: complex land ownership and community governance issues; conflicting government plans; few real incentives for landowners — and conservation agencies stretched thin. On-the-ground realities Then comes the issue of managing protected areas amid thorny on-the-ground realities. Setting the scene, Pooley brought a hard edge to the conversation through a sobering historical lens. 'I'm slightly Mr Bad News today,' he quipped, as he recounted the layered, unresolved struggles at Ndumo Game Reserve in northern KwaZulu-Natal — one of South Africa's oldest protected areas, now under siege, 101 years after its proclamation in 1924. Pooley grew up in Ndumo, describing it as 'a little pocket of extraordinary biodiversity nestled in the confluence of the Usuthu and the Pongola rivers … teeming with water, birds, fishes, harumphing hippopotamus and crocodiles basking on the grazing lawns'. Like many others, Pooley's childhood, immersed in this natural world, led to him becoming a conservationist. But this was not the case for many of his childhood playmates, whose parents had once lived inside the reserve. 'Many South Africans were evicted from this fenced reserve. This was to maintain a refuge on the country's most biodiverse floodplain for animals which are difficult to live with, like crocodiles, hippos, rhinos,' said Pooley. This gave rise to deep, unresolved tensions. 'Locals had been living alongside the wildlife from the proclamation of the reserve in 1924 up until 1966,' Pooley noted. But during apartheid, animal conservation was prioritised over people's rights. When remittances failed to arrive back from the mines, 'mothers and children entered the reserve to catch animals for food. What had been subsistence use was now classified as poaching,' said Pooley. Rangers, he added, were caught between enforcing the law and sympathising with the hunger and hardship around them. In recent years, the reserve was handed to a new provincial authority, and a land claim was settled in 2008. Although 'co-management with communities commenced' and 'the era of fortress conservation was over,' Pooley said the practical management plans for the reserve were never clearly defined, and the terms of the land claim were disputed — and still are. Politicians' promises Then, 'during fierce political campaigning in national elections, politicians made rash promises to give locals land in the reserve,' said Pooley. These pledges to return land crossed the bounds of legality and were later abandoned. All of this, combined with high unemployment and the lack of much promised development, fuelled anger among the local population, leading to fence cutting and illegal occupation. The Ndumo Game Reserve — the most prominent local symbol of provincial authority — became 'a lightning rod for frustration', said Pooley. Today, despite the dedicated work of generations of conservationists, Ndumo is under serious threat. Its eastern region is under occupation by farmers, fishermen and cattle herders. It has suffered the loss of all its rhinos and a 'shocking decline' in crocodile and hippo numbers. Now, mineral prospecting applications are in progress. In conclusion, Pooley acknowledged that while it was important to find new land to conserve to achieve the 30×30 targets, a lot more could be done to better manage and preserve existing protected areas. 'Let's not forget to protect the land we've already got,' said Pooley. Morris agreed. 'We're kind of neglecting what we already have, and I see this as a serious challenge.' Morris acknowledged, too, that the process of declaring a protected area was 'by no means easy'. 'It takes time,' he said, 'anything from 12 months to two years.' He said over the past 15 years, Mpumalanga had added 162,859 hectares to its protected area estate, but at this rate, it would take 'another 68 years to reach the 30% target. ' He said while progress was being made in encouraging landowners to conserve their land, better incentives could be offered to counter the 'indiscriminate granting of mining rights even within some of our protected areas.' And unfortunately, 'areas of high biodiversity value virtually always lose out' in strategic land use planning debates. He cited as an example the massive expansion of wind energy facilities in the grassy biomes of Mpumalanga, driven by the country's weak grid capacity. This, he said, posed significant threats to birds and bats, potentially impacting on biodiversity in the region. Looking to the future, Natasha Wilson said South Africa's 'remarkable biodiversity' demands a rethink of how conservation is done — and who it's for. Historically, SANParks has worked 'very much within our fences and within our boundaries,' but the organisation is now undergoing a 'radical departure' from this model. The future, she said, lay outside the fences, in partnerships that recognised the need to balance people and nature. New approaches A good example, said Wilson, was a new national park being declared in the grasslands near Maclear in the north-eastern Eastern Cape. 'Here, we are working with a range of landowners who are willingly contributing their land to conservation,' she said. 'And we've taken quite a different stance — we're looking at livestock as a driver in the ecosystem, as part of the park.' The initiative reflects a broader SANParks strategy rooted in the idea of 'mega living landscapes' — places where conservation supports, and is supported by, the people who live there. Wilson acknowledged this was 'very difficult work' and often a process of 'learning as you're doing', but said there was growing momentum, with 'just over 10,000 hectares' in the pipeline for declaration later this year. Essential to the success of this inclusive, landscape-level approach was building social legitimacy through power-sharing and respect for people's rights and dignity, said Wilson. And this involved collaborating with diverse landholders, from communal farmers to private landowners, and using legislative tools such as biodiversity stewardship to scale up conservation beyond protected areas. Beyond monetary value As the discussion wrapped up, it moved to the very essence of why conservation was pursued, moving beyond purely economic justifications. Pooley argued that if conservation was forced to 'pay its way' and measured only by 'rand value', it would 'lose every single time that the mining, or whatever the latest scheme to grow cotton, comes along'. He also said many conservationists often forgot that there was 'homegrown local, indigenous interest in conservation'. Therefore, it shouldn't be seen as 'a sort of battle to convert people to something entirely new'. Murphy agreed, stressing that modern conservation efforts should support and empower existing, long-standing practices of land stewardship deeply embedded within indigenous cultures. 'The land is invaluable, priceless actually, we cannot put a price tag on it,' said Murphy. And for indigenous people, 'it's not a new thing to conserve their land'. According to the World Bank, about 476 million indigenous people, including those in Africa, hold tenure rights to about a quarter of the world's surface area, accounting for a significant portion of the world's biodiversity. DM Fred Kockott is the director of the environmental journalism training agency, Roving Reporters. This article was produced with assistance from Jive Media Africa, science communication partner of Oppenheimer Generations Research and Conservation.
The South African
a day ago
- The South African
Outpouring of grief following death of Cape Town school's headmaster
There has been an outpouring of grief, sympathy and condolences following the death of popular Fairmont High School headmaster, Leon Erasmus. He was 59. Several of Erasmus's previous schools where he taught, as well as schools in the area, also paid tribute. In a Facebook post, Fairmont High School in Durbanville in Cape Town wrote: Dear Fairmont High School Community, It is with profound sadness that we share the news of the passing of our beloved Headmaster, Mr. Leon Erasmus. Mr. Erasmus was a man of immense strength, integrity, and honour. He led our school with unwavering dedication and a deep sense of purpose, showing us – his family, our staff, students, and the wider community – what it truly means to fight. Fight for others. Fight for good. Fight for progress. And above all, fight to live. Today, we mourn the loss of a remarkable leader and human being. But more than that, we celebrate a life that left a lasting mark on each of us. His legacy of courage, compassion, and excellence will continue to inspire Fairmont for years to come. While our hearts are saddened, we are deeply grateful to have had Mr. Erasmus lead us all. He was not only at the helm of our school; he was at the heart of it. His legacy will live on in the values he upheld and the lives he touched, his guidance, vision, and spirit will forever remain part of our fabric. We extend our heartfelt condolences to his wife, daughters, son-in-law, grandson, mother and all loved ones during this incredibly difficult time. We will share details of the celebration of his life, in due course. With respect and remembrance, Fairmont High School Post your condolences below, by … Leaving a comment below, or sending a WhatsApp to 060 011 021 1 Subscribe to The South African website's newsletters and follow us on WhatsApp, Facebook, X and Bluesky for the latest news.
IOL News
3 days ago
- IOL News
Indenture history often ignored in schools
The first Indian indentured labourers arrived in Durban harbour aboard the Truro in 1860. The writer says in most schools today, the history of indenture is accorded only cursory attention and this leads to a lack of knowledge about the drudgery and poverty faced by the early Indian labourers under colonial rule. Image: File REMEMBER the old days when the teaching of history in our schools was so Eurocentric, you'd be forgiven for thinking human life only began here in the year who do we have to blame for that? Because history tended to be written by those in power, the only names earning mention in our text books were white colonial leaders. Prominent among them were Jan van Riebeeck, Simon van der Stel, Paul Kruger, Jan Smuts, Charles Somerset, Dick King, not forgetting Benjamin D'Urban after whom our city was named. In more recent years, the teaching of history was so distorted under apartheid that children were taught to laud the achievements and milestones of whites while the historical experiences of people of colour were relegated to mere footnotes. So, ignorance and the breeding of dangerous racial stereotypes flourished. Video Player is loading. Play Video Play Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration -:- Loaded : 0% Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Window Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Transparency Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Dropshadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. Advertisement Next Stay Close ✕ A case in point is the teaching of Indian indenture history in our schools. In most schools today, it is accorded only cursory attention, leading to a pathetic lack of knowledge about the drudgery and poverty faced by the early Indian labourers under colonial rule. South Africa, and that includes many Indian South Africans, are totally unaware of how the labourers were recruited from India; their harrowing experiences on their sea journey across the ocean to Durban, and that when they got here, they were to discover indentureship was just a euphemism for slavery. Local teachers I spoke to say while indentured history is officially part of the syllabus, it receives only skimpy attention in most schools or is often ignored altogether. I particularly liked the idea proposed by Selvan Naidoo, curator of the 1860 Heritage Centre, to achieve a national approach to the understanding of South African history: "The solution would be to include indenture, slavery and the Struggle history (in South Africa) as part of the Grade 12 exam paper and make history a compulsory subject."As some wise person once said: You have to know the past to understand the present. Beware Trump's apartheid-like control Every year, thousands of fresh-faced young men and women flock to universities and other tertiary institutions to further their studies. Not all of them make it. But for those who do, it is the beginning of an exciting new chapter in their lives. In a flash, they are transported to a culture of independent thinking, problem solving and a cross pollination of views and ideas they had never encountered before. What an exciting time in a young person's life. I know because I had two bites of the cherry in my younger days - one bitter and the other, so sweet I will savour it for the rest of my life. US President Donald Trump Image: AFP The first was at the apartheid-inspired "bush college" for Indians at Salisbury Island. The campus was a soulless and discarded army barracks; much of the academic curriculum was narrow and uninspiring; and the apartheid authorities were intent on imposing ideological and academic control over students and the institution's faculties. It was only the hunger and determination of students there to succeed against such imposing odds that helped maintain a healthy balance on the campus. The second came after I was awarded a Nieman Fellowship to study at Harvard University in the US. What an eye-opening experience it was as the doors opened to a new world of international diversity in which free thinking and the experimentation with ideas were the order of the day. It was the best year of my life. That's why it's so distressing to hear that Harvard is today being bullied by that xenophobic president of the United States, Donald Trump who wants all foreign students at the institution out. And his reason for such repressive action is patently clear - he wants ideological control over Harvard's governance, curriculum and students. Which begs the question? How different is Trump's behaviour from what the apartheid regime did to control racially-separated "bush colleges" here not so long ago? Pay as much as you wish How would you like to go to a restaurant and when it's time to pay the bill, the manager says: "No, we don't charge customers here. You pay as much as you wish." Sounds too good to be true, eh? Well, I came across the innovative concept on Facebook recently as the manager of the Annalucksmi Riverside restaurant in Malaysia waxed lyrical about the "homely feeling" his menu provided and the virtues of feeding mankind rather than just a chosen few. Dishing out a delicious buffet helping of rice and veg curry, with some mango pickle, russom and papad thrown in, he said the concept was not based on money but love. Patrons are not charged, but can "give what their heart feels like". Reaction on social media was somewhat mixed. While some praised the concept, others were sceptical, with one saying "When you donate with your right hand, the left hand should not know. "Do you think the concept can work here? Dennis Pather Image: File
