14 Billion Litres-A-Year Cape Town Sewage Scandal

ActionSA’s parliamentary questions have confirmed that raw sewage discharge into the ocean continues unabated while critical environmental safeguards remain suspended at the City of Cape Town’s marine outfalls.

The DFFE Minister’s response makes clear that discharge permits for Hout Bay, Camps Bay and Sea Point remain in force, despite the suspension of daily effluent limits since August 2024 due to the City’s inability to comply. This effectively means that, for nearly two years, sewage discharge has continued without enforceable volume limits — an extraordinary failure of environmental governance.

This situation is made worse by the fact that the same party governs both the City of Cape Town and the national department responsible for regulating it. When the same party is responsible for both the polluter and the regulator, accountability is too easily replaced with accommodation.

Equally concerning is that all appeals against these permits remain unresolved, with the Minister now indicating that a decision may only be finalised by the end of May 2026 following input from an expert panel. While ActionSA supports evidence-based decision-making, this protracted process has created a regulatory vacuum in which pollution continues with limited constraint.

The Department’s own figures confirm the scale of the problem: approximately 38 million litres of effluent are discharged into the ocean every single day from these outfalls, equivalent to over 260 million litres per week and nearly 14 billion litres per year. This ongoing pollution poses a direct threat to marine ecosystems, public health, and Cape Town’s tourism economy.

ActionSA has consistently warned that the City’s reliance on marine outfalls is environmentally unsustainable and legally questionable. In fact, ActionSA has already filed criminal charges against the City of Cape Town over what City records themselves confirm to be unlawful non-compliance with marine outfall permit conditions, including exceedances in effluent limits and failures in mandatory monitoring obligations. 

Through our submissions to the Department, oversight efforts, and public advocacy — including our “Shitty Tour” — we have demonstrated that this is not merely a technical issue, but a governance failure with potential criminal implications, driven by a lack of urgency, accountability, and long-term planning. 

The Minister’s reply confirms what ActionSA has argued all along: that both the City of Cape Town and national government have allowed a situation to persist where non-compliance is effectively accommodated rather than corrected. 

ActionSA believes this approach is fundamentally flawed. Environmental regulation cannot be contingent on convenience. Where municipalities cannot meet permit conditions, the solution is not to suspend limits indefinitely, but to enforce compliance and accelerate infrastructure upgrades.

Our plan to resolve this crisis is clear:

• Zero-based budgeting for water and sanitation infrastructure, ensuring that critical upgrades are prioritised and ring-fenced from misallocation;
• Time-bound infrastructure investment plans to end reliance on marine outfalls and expand wastewater treatment capacity;
• Strict enforcement of discharge permits, including criminal liability for repeated or wilful non-compliance; 
• Independent monitoring and transparent public reporting of effluent discharge and water quality data. 

This approach aligns with ActionSA’s broader Environmental and Climate Policy, which emphasises enforcement capacity, accountability, and data-driven decision-making as the foundation of effective environmental governance.

ActionSA will continue to pursue this matter through Parliament and other oversight mechanisms to ensure that both the City and the Department are held accountable. South Africans cannot be expected to accept ongoing marine pollution as the status quo while bureaucratic processes drag on.

The continued discharge of untreated or inadequately treated sewage into our oceans is not just an environmental issue. It is a public health risk, an economic threat, and a clear test of whether government is capable of enforcing its own laws.

ActionSA Electoral Growth: Expanded quickly into KZN and the Western Cape.