It is clear that the City of eThekwini has dragged its feet throughout the dumping of medical waste on KwaZulu-Natal beaches debacle and is failing to adequately and timeously deal with the issue, the Democratic Alliance said on Sunday.
“A visit by the DA to the offices of eThekwini deputy city manager Dr Musa Gumede after the recent dumping of medical waste on several metro beaches has revealed that another incident took place at the Isipingo beach last weekend,” DA MPL and KwaZulu-Natal health spokesman Imran Keeka said.
“In this case there was no storm that could have contributed to medicines and other medical waste being washed downstream,” he said.
Thursday’s visit was intended to establish whether the city had answers as to how the earlier incident took place.
“Disappointingly, Dr Gumede was not able to offer any real answers. Instead what we got was postulations and theories of how the mess may have arose,” Keeka said.
Among the hypotheses Gumede highlighted were that the medicines could have been washed into the river from a Woonga factory after heavy rain or that the medical waste may have washed downstream from informal or illegal dispensaries in settlements along the banks of the river.
“It is clear that there is not enough vigilance around the issue of medical dumping. Both the Isipingo incident and the one that made media headlines had to be reported by community members – this despite eThekwini’s 300 strong environmental staff contingent.
“In the first incident, it was also left to citizens and councillors to clean up the beach after the waste was left there for around a week. One wonders what would have happened had this been highly hazardous medical waste,” Keeka said.
If this incident was anything to go by then environmental health measures needed to be more strictly enforced and vigilance strategies either stepped up or reviewed so that these matters were dealt with swiftly and effectively.
“It is clear that the city has dragged its feet throughout this entire debacle, failing to adequately and timeously deal with both matters.”
The DA had previously suggested the installation of floating booms in rivers to trap the garbage. This had fallen on the deaf ears of an uncaring city political leadership. Perhaps, instead of wasting exorbitant amounts of money on frivolous travel and entertainment, they should take a trip down the coast, he said.
On a positive note, Gumede did confirm that an investigation was underway regarding medicine bottle and condom batch numbers which could then be used to trace their possible origins. He also informed the DA that he would be tabling a report at the metro’s executive committee (exco) on Tuesday.
“The DA will request that our eThekwini exco members keep us informed of the report and to ensure that our suggestions to prevent further episodes are taken into account,” Keeka said.
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