Landowners reserve rights to private dams

Maranyane Ngwanaamotho | Friday February 21, 2014 16:27

 

“You will note that these are small private dams on private and communal land and it is not a pre-requisite for them to inform WUC when they undertake the construction of such,” she said.

The WUC and the Department of Water Affairs have distanced themselves from the responsibility of licensing private dams along Gaborone dam catchment area, which have been suspected of holding water from the national dam.

The WUC argues that the Water Apportionment Board in the Department of Water Affairs licenses water rights, while WUC’s responsibility is to distribute potable water and manage wastewater. The department has on the other hand distanced itself from answering questions about the dams, asserting that those were questions to be answered by the corporation.

Mmipi said that the last time a study was done was in 2006 and there were about 201 dams in the catchment area, which includes Otse, Mogobane, Lobatse, Ramotswa and surrounding areas.

Studies, she says, indicate that the private dams affect Gaborone Dam by 30 percent. In the past when the rains were good in the south-eastern part of the country these dams did not affect the Gaborone dam significantly. It is only in recent years when the rains have been poor that the Gaborone Dam has not been doing well, she said.Meanwhile, Former Minister of Minerals, Energy and Water Resources, Charles Tibone said in Parliament in 2006 that there were 203 small dams in the Gaborone Dam catchment area, which stretched even to South Africa. He said the figure was arrived at after a 1992 study on the Impact of Small Dams on Downstream Water Resources. “Following the study, a moratorium on the construction of small dams in the catchment area was imposed,” he explained.

The minister said most of the dams were very small, with a capacity of less than 100,000 cubic metres.

Their total capacity amounted to 26 million cubic metres as opposed to 144 million for Gaborone Dam. He said Ngotwane Dam in Lehurutse, South Africa was the biggest in the catchment area with a capacity of 18 million cubic metres. He said of the significant dams, only Nnywane near Lobatse was used for domestic water supply. The rest of the dams in the country were used for agricultural purposes like stock watering and irrigation.

However, there have been debates about the impacts of the private dams along the catchment area with others arguing that the dams have previously played an important role of trapping sedimentation, which would have piled into Gaborone dam.

Although it may have appeared to the layman that rains have been heavy, they have not been good enough to fill all the private dams and the national dam. WUC infrastructure director, Gaselemogwe Senai has also indicated that the dams have always helped in trapping silt.