South Africa is looking to Cuba – a country with its own urban water problems – for engineers and geo-hydrologists to help it tackle its looming water infrastructure crisis.
Water Affairs Minister Edna Molewa last night signed an agreement with her Cuban counterpart, Ines Maria Chapman Waugh, at OR Tambo International Airport, intended to pave the way for the recruitment of 34 Cuban engineers on two-year contracts from early next year.
Cuba has massive water problems. According to the Canadian International Development Research Centre, its water and sanitation services have deteriorated badly, resulting in an increase in water-borne diseases.
This is part of a wide-ranging recruitment drive by the department to find skilled professionals to deal with South Africa’s water problems.
“We have already signed up the first batch of six engineers and they will be arriving early next year,” said the department’s spokesman, Themba Khumalo.
“We are busy with the recruitment of the second batch of 13 engineers and [are planning to recruit] a third batch of 15,” he said.
He said the agreement was one of many to be signed with a number of countries in a bid to deal with the water crisis.
Dr Anthony Turton, an independent scientist specialising in water services, said that to import Cuban engineers to deal with the crisis was “skew, foolish and ill thought through”.
“You are saying to the South African engineer that you are not useful to our society,” he said.
Turton said South Africa had enough skilled professionals to deal with the water crisis but that white engineers had been “pushed out” of the public sector and were working as private contractors, selling their skills back to the state at “four or five times as much” as they would have earned in its employ.
“Transformation means you […] the underachievers keep their positions in the bureaucracy,” Turton said.
South Africa is at present losing 36.8% of its water through bad infrastructure management, mainly the result of an extreme shortage of skilled water professionals. The wastage costs the country more than R11-billion a year.
He said the Cuban engineers would be deployed in rural and disadvantaged areas.
