Where money goes, water could flow, but right now the funds for critical work are not available

The proposed Ntabelanga Dam in the Eastern Cape will quickly become a white elephant if the grasslands above it are not repaired first.

- Leonie Joubert

From a bird’s eye view, this bank on the Tina River in the Eastern Cape highlands looks like it’s suffering a failed hair transplant. The satellite photos capture row upon row of round plugs in neat symmetry in the ochre ground. Some have a faint shadow where grass has sprouted.

Most are the leftover contours of hand-dug ponds, each not much wider than the diameter of a car tyre, which were sunk into the cement-hard ground in the hope that they’d become islands of plant growth that would allow the veld to recover.

If the grass regrows and stabilises the riverbank, it should slow the flood of topsoil and sand that has clogged up the Mount Fletcher weir, a small downstream reservoir that cost R900-million to build, but now can only hold a third of its intended capacity.

Just four years after a low, scalloped wall was built across an elbow of the Tina River in 2014 on the outskirts of a town that shared its name – today, the town falls under Tlokoeng – the weir had lost roughly two-thirds of its holding capacity. The upstream grassland is so threadbare from overgrazing that the soil had been scoured away by rain and dumped into the belly of the reservoir.

Just 50km from here is the site of the proposed Ntabelanga Dam, a R10-billion project that has been on the cards for a decade.

Natural resource managers in the government as well as conservationists in civil society organisations warn that if the grasslands in the dam’s catchment aren’t repaired, this costly investment will face the same plight as the Mount Fletcher weir.