Africa-Press – South-Africa. A tweet by the eThekwini Municipality, regarding a wave of sewage spills at Cape beaches, rubbed City of Cape Town officials up the wrong way on Wednesday.
In a post on the eThekwini Municipality’s Twitter page, the chairperson of the governance and human capital committee, Nkosenhle Madlala, wished colleagues in Cape Town a “speedy recovery” as they battle sewage spillages on some beaches.
“Running a metro is a complex task fraught with many challenges, even if you have been spared from the devastating floods experienced in April last year. We wish them a speedy recovery,” the tweet read.
Madlala told News24: “It’s a gesture of goodwill to our sister city, which is dealing with the same challenges we are going through as Durban.”
The City of Cape Town has been affected by the impact of load shedding in recent weeks, which resulted in sewage spilling onto a number of beaches and forcing the City to implement closures.
Most recently, the City announced the temporary closure of a section of Strand Beach, on the False Bay coast, at Small Bay, in Blaauwberg, and Fish Hoek Beach as a “precautionary measure”.
eThekwini has, for months, been battling with high E.coli levels at many of its beaches, as a result of failing infrastructure, which it attributed to damage caused by the floods in April last year.
But Cape Town officials weren’t too happy with eThekwini’s tweet.
Alex Lansdowne, the chairperson of the mayoral advisory committee on water quality in wetlands and waterways, said: “In Cape Town, when there is a sewage pollution incident, we rapidly dispatch teams to repair infrastructure.
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“We also have environmental health protocols to close beaches and then scientifically monitor the environment until it’s safe for recreational use.”
Lansdowne said eThekwini had sewage flowing into its rivers and oceans 24 hours a day.
“It does not seem like they have a plan to protect their waterways and beaches. In Cape Town, we take water pollution very seriously. We do not take political cheap shots with issues so dangerous for people’s health and the environment. I think whoever runs the eThekwini Facebook page is callous and needs to check themselves,” Lansdowne said.
Msawakhe Mayisela, the eThekwini municipality spokesperson, said they stick firmly to their statement.
Twitter users slammed the tweet, saying it was a “classless tweet from an incompetent, corrupt and useless municipality”.
Other Twitter users said the municipality was behaving in a “petty” and “childish” manner.
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