Chairperson, in South Africa we manage what is called the Orange-Senqu River Commission, Orasecom, arrangements. This is at the Southern African Development Community, SADC, regional level and the continental level. In other words, it is joint management by countries in the SADC region, particularly of our three rivers that we share - the Orange River, the Vaal River and the Olifants River in Limpopo. In that management, in whatever we do in South Africa and whatever they do in Botswana it is agreed never to have a negative impact on what people do in Namibia, for instance. There is a sharing of the water in the rivers in an agreed and scientifically calculated manner. The Lesotho Highlands Water Project is part of ensuring that we augment our waters in those rivers, particularly the Orange and the Vaal River. That augmentation takes water even up to Namibia and Botswana. That is at the broader level. I thought I should say that as an introduction so that we know how this international or neighbourly management of water is happening.
Linked to that is that we agreed that it should not happen that, for instance, a pipeline passed a community by and ran to a power station! Unfortunately, this thing used to happen in the past - that was the way planning was done. It was done in such a manner that we rushed to build a power station and supply water to the power station, while passing communities by. In this instance, we have a resolution that was taken by the ruling party that water provision should be integrated in every way; not just for drinking, but also for the economic use of those communities.
The first project that was started along those lines was the De Hoop project. If you look at the De Hoop project, you will see it is a fully integrated project, a dam that they started building after the resolution was taken. With agriculture and domestic use in all those communities in mind, once the De Hoop Dam is finished, there will be reticulation via the pipeline to the communities of Sekhukhune.
The same applies to Lesotho. When we augment the water in our rivers, we will be giving water to the communities of the Free State. Let me also say this. The reality of the matter, colleagues, is that the communities of the Free State do not necessarily run short of water. And "short of water" means from the resource point of view. Three quarters of the water catchment of our country is actually in the Free State, in the Vaal catchment.
What is happening is that there are terrible problems relating to infrastructure. These things that I am talking about, unrefurbished dysfunctional infrastructure, are actually relevant and they are found more in the Free State. Those are the issues that we are attending to. Once that infrastructure is serviced properly, we can reach the people.
Please forgive me, Chairperson - let me take a minute to illustrate this. There is infrastructure that was built in Ficksburg - the Ficksburg that we are talking about today. Connections for those pipes, the new infrastructure, were put in, and they brought this matter to my office. Where the connection took place there were no holes to allow the water to flow through. This is how the infrastructure was built. Once we found out that the water could not reach the people because there were no holes to allow water to get into the pipelines, we rebuilt the pipelines.
We almost elevated another dam wall, but because the infrastructure has now been refurbished and corrected, we no longer need to spend money on doing that project. We no longer need to raise that wall, and we are attending to this infrastructure at the municipal level, at the resource level. Thank you.