04-05-2025
A tale of two dams — Grasslands restoration is as important as engineering solutions to ensure SA's future water security
In his State of the Nation Address, President Ramaphosa boasted of the preparations to build the Ntabelanga Dam in the Eastern Cape. However, this R10-billion construction will quickly go to waste if the grasslands above it aren't repaired, and catchment restoration is dead in the water after government funding cuts and stagnant tendering processes.
From a bird's eye view, this bank on the Tina River in the Eastern Cape highlands looks like it's suffering a failed hair transplant. The satellite photos capture row upon row of round plugs in neat symmetry in the ochre ground. Some have a faint shadow where grass has sprouted. Most are the leftover contours of hand-dug ponds, each not much wider than the diameter of a car tyre, which were sunk into the cement-hard ground in the hope that they'd become islands of plant growth that would allow the veld to recover.
If the grass regrows and stabilises the riverbank, it should slow the flood of topsoil and sand that has clogged up the Mount Fletcher weir, a small downstream reservoir that cost R900-million to build, but now can only hold a third of its intended capacity.
The weir has become something of a personality in conservation circles, but for all the wrong reasons. Just four years after a low, scalloped wall was built across an elbow of the Tina River in 2014 on the outskirts of a town that shared its name — today, the town falls under Tlokoeng — the weir had lost roughly two-thirds of its holding capacity. The upstream grassland is so threadbare from overgrazing that the soil had been scoured away by rain and dumped into the belly of the reservoir.
Just 50km from here is the site of the proposed Ntabelanga Dam, a R10-billion project that has been on the cards for a decade and which was a talking point in President Cyril Ramaphosa's State of the Nation Address this February.
Natural resource managers inside government, as well as conservationists with civil society organisations, warn that if the grasslands in the dam's catchment aren't repaired, this costly investment will face the same plight as the Mount Fletcher weir.
Back in 2014, the department's chief director of the then Department of Environmental Affairs' Natural Resource Management Programmes, Dr Christo Marias calculated that for just 5% of the total cost of the project – which covers the building of the dam, a water treatment plant and the bulk water distribution network – spent over a 12 year period, these grasslands can be stabilised enough to keep the Ntabelanga Dam relatively silt-free. That amounts to R532-million in total, or around R44-million a year.
But government funding for wetland and grassland restoration, including the clearing of invasive alien plants under the Working for Water and related ecosystem restoration projects, has been throttled so dramatically that it has brought restoration work here in the Eastern Cape and in many other parts of the country to an indefinite halt. The Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (DFFE) attributes this to the response by its then-minister, Barbara Creecy, to post-Covid budget cuts by the Treasury, which hit all departments hard. But people close to the DFFE say a shift in spending priorities is to blame, along with a change in 2015 to an onerous and slow tender process for distributing funds.
The abandoned riverbank repair job upstream of the Mount Fletcher weir was among the victims, as were the many people who were paid to wield shovels as part of the restoration work.
Rob Scholz is known in these parts as the guy who mends broken wetlands. It's a miserable Eastern Cape day in February, and he's explaining why the municipality was paying locals to dig 40,000-odd pint-sized ponds in the banks of the Tina River, and how these might help the riverbank recover.
'(Rain) just runs off (hard soil). You get hardly any absorption of water. With that ponding you're making little water traps.'
Each pond can hold about 25l of water. Even if a pond is only half-filled during a storm, a catchment with 40,000 such indentations can store half a million litres of water, allowing it to seep slowly into the soil rather than flashing off the top and stripping away anything unmoored in its path. Over time, they become islands which hold moisture and in which plants germinate and take root.
'It was actually amazing. Within a year, some of those areas grassed up.'
The before-and-after photographs bear up. The recovery at some sites where the teams worked is objectively quite remarkable.
Scholz is interrupted by his phone. Someone wants advice on what kind of animal feed to buy.
A trained forester, Scholz worked in the natural resource management office at the Joe Gqabi District Municipality (JGDM) for 24 years and was unit manager when he and his team lost their jobs in 2024.
Now, Scholz works for a local agri-business operation based in Ugie and Nqanqarhu.
The municipality's funding for the Tina River work came mostly from the pool of money aimed at ecosystem restoration work, the Working for Water and related projects that fall under the DFFE's budget for environmental programmes. But in 2015 the state changed how it distributes these funds, from a grant system, to one that requires municipalities to tender for funds alongside private contractors.
The red tape proved to be onerous and the processing so slow that funding often came through too late in a financial year to allow the clearing and restoration work to be done on time. The uncertainty made planning difficult.
By 2020, tender processing slowed and then ground to a halt. Scholz and acting municipal manager Fiona Sephton went as far as to travel to Cape Town to get some clarity from the DFFE on their applications. Meanwhile, the municipality was fast running out of money to keep its natural resource management office and its contractors afloat.
To date, no tenders have been issued for Working for Water (WfW) projects in the Eastern Cape for two years.
The post-Covid cash crunch also saw the Treasury cut budgets dramatically across all departments. Creecy's response within the DFFE resulted in the WfW's pot reduced from R1.7-billion in the 2020/21 financial year, to just R377-million in 2024.
The department confirmed these figures, saying it reflected Creecy's response to general funding cuts at the time. Although the department's own figures suggest that the cuts to WfW were a shift in priorities rather than a shortage of cash.
The total spend for the department's environmental programmes, under which WfW sits, remains relatively constant since then – R2.6-billion for 2020/21 and 2021/22; R3.2-billion for 2022/23; and R2.9-billion for 2023/24 — even while WfW has seen a 78% decrease on the previous budget. Several sources outside the department who are close to its senior structures, as well as staff inside the department, say this was a political decision reflecting changing priorities rather than a shortage of funding.
The DFFE did not respond to specific questions relating to this decision.
Either way, these events proved the death knell for the district municipality's grasslands repair work – which was positioned as job creation and economic development, not water catchment management since this isn't a municipal mandate – money for the team's salaries was gone, as were the funds to pay contracting teams drawn from the Tlokoeng community who did the heavily lifting in the restoration work along the Tina River.
With no fixed contract, Scholz left his job of nearly 25 years at the municipality 'with nothing', not even a retrenchment package.
'It's one of those things,' he says pragmatically. Others are far worse off.
'We had about 850 to 900 people working in these programmes [across the wider district].' By his estimation, the district municipality is probably the second-biggest employer in the area, after the local private forestry company, PG Bison.
There isn't much work for people in the town of Tlokoeng, formerly known as Mount Fletcher. Most families are dependent on social grants, so the Tina River restoration work was a boon when it happened, says Chief Montoeli Lehana of the Batlokoa Traditional Council.
He was the main liaison between the Tlokoeng community and the JGDM for the Tina River work, and is understated when he says how 'sad' it was when the money dried up.
'It employed about 30 contractors, and each contractor employed plus-minus 20 people,' he says.
The principal of the local high school even commented on how pupils were arriving at school with food in their stomachs when these jobs were in play.
'It was sad when we heard that there's no more budget for that project. Imagine, the number of people who suddenly had to stop [working] because there was no budget. The explanation was not enough.'
There's no indication from the new environment minister, Dr Dion George, who took the helm of DFFE in July 2024, whether he will revisit the spending decisions for ecosystem restoration nationally, or grasslands rehabilitation here in the catchments of the Mount Fletcher weir or the proposed Ntabelanga Dam.
But whatever shuffling of funds happens in budgetary spreadsheets in the DFFE's national office has real-world consequences for the future of water catchments of the Eastern Cape and the food that families can put on the table in obscure rural towns like Tlokoeng that are far from the corridors of power. DM
This is part of the Golden Threads series for the Story Ark – tales from southern Africa's climate tipping points project, which investigates the state of the country's old-growth grasslands, the free natural services they offer and what South Africa needs to do to conserve and repair them.
The series is a collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies and the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, which supports investigative journalism.
