Civil society organisation AfriForum has started its yearly programme to test South Africa’s water.

Branches nationwide are testing the water quality of drinking water and water at wastewater treatment works during August, and will publish the results in the organisation’s blue and green drop report in due course.

“The organisation has been fulfilling a monitoring role with their blue and green drop project since 2013 after the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) stopped compiling their blue and green drop report,” said AfriForum environmental affairs adviser Marais de Vaal.

While the DWS resuscitated their Blue, Green and No Drop reports, AfriForum plans to continue conducting independent water tests, making the results available to the public, noting that it is important that communities know if their water is safe to consume.

Should the organisation’s testing indicate that the prescribed standards are not met, it will ensure that communities are immediately notified of any dangers and urge the relevant municipality to resolve the problems as soon as possible.

“AfriForum has already this year repeatedly put the spotlight on the impending water crisis in South Africa and the government’s failure to solve the poor state of water infrastructure and natural water resources,” the organisation said in a statement released on Wednesday.

“Despite numerous complaints from communities about sewage in drinking water and even no drinking water, it appears that the government is still unable or unwilling to act.”

According to AfriForum, millions of litres of raw sewage are dumped into rivers – the source of drinking water for millions of people nationwide – owing to the poor to critical condition and insufficient capacity of wastewater treatment works, which creates the ideal conditions for the spread of waterborne diseases, as seen with the cholera outbreak last year.

“The DWS’s own Blue and Green Drop report last year left much to be desired. According to this report, 46% of drinking water is microbiologically unsafe for human consumption; 24% failed to be chemically suitable for human consumption; and 67.6% of all sewage treatment works in the country are in a high or critical risk category, which means sewage cannot be treated to sufficient standards to be released safely into the environment.

“We can no longer rely on the government to provide safe water and therefore we test the water quality ourselves,” added AfriForum environmental affairs manager Lambert de Klerk.