'Say goodbye to Cape Town tourists if you don't stop marine pollution,' says ActionSA

Cape Town risks an exodus of tourists similar to eThekwini if it doesn’t stop pumping raw sewage into the ocean, ActionSA said on Monday.

The party, which is campaigning around the issue of South Africa’s crumbling infrastructure, took to the skies on Monday in a chartered helicopter to get a view of Cape Town’s now infamous marine outfall pipes. The city disposes of a large volume of “partially treated” sewage via outfall pipes at three different locations, raising the ire of many residents.

ActionSA infrastructure campaign spokesperson Michael Beaumont said the city is in denial about the scale of its marine pollution problem and could suffer serious consequences in human health and economic wellbeing.

“What we see around the country is sewage killing businesses and jobs,” Beaumont said at a press briefing after an aerial tour of the main outfall sites.

“eThekwini in 2015 had 7.9-million tourists visiting its coastline. Today that number is less than 800,000. That is the devastating effect of sewage on the coastline of eThekwini. eThekwini needs to be a wake-up call because [Cape Town is] heading in that direction.

“The beaches of the beautiful city are being shut because they are unsafe.”

ActionSA laid criminal charges against the city for mismanagement of the Hout Bay outfall site where documents showed the city had regularly exceeded its permissible outfall volume, among a list of other failings, he said. 

The city was also being disingenuous by labelling the discharge as “partially” treated when it had only been sieved through a screen and not subjected to any chemical treatment process, he alleged.

“No-one believes this can be solved tomorrow. But we cannot begin to make long-term improvements if we are still denying the problem,” Beaumont said.

In recent months the city has acknowledged sewage treatment shortcomings and has committed to investigating alternatives to the marine outfalls. Water treatment infrastructure is insufficient to match the volume of sewage produced by the fast-growing city, whose population has doubled in the past 20 years. 

Angela Sobey, ActionSA premier candidate for the Western Cape, said the province's apartheid legacy was aggravating the pollution problem because of a history of underdevelopment in the most populated areas.

“One of the bigger challenges we are dealing with in the Western Cape is the lack of political will to address apartheid-legacy spatial panning and these are the areas hardest hit,” Sobey said. 

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