It is appalling that The Herald continues to allow Garth Sampson to spew misinformation in his weekly YourViews piece and pay lip service to the single biggest reason as to why NMBM lurches from one water crisis to another. I would also like to call out the misinformation from his January 23 article. Sampson claims we just had the driest second half of the year in 125 years.
I live in Gqeberha and measured 268mm rainfall in line with the average, and definitely not the driest, unless you live at the airport where Sampson takes his skewed measures. He claims we were never truly released from the grip of drought. Not true, we had 887mm of rain in 2024 and 2023 was also a well-above-average year.
Sampson states that only two years yielded above-average rainfall of 534mm since 2012. I measured 663mm in 2025, and 887mm in 2024 … the last two years were both above average which contradicts Sampson’s claims that 2023 was the last year.
Read Full Article on Herald Live
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It wasn’t. NMBM is not responsible for providing water to Patensie, St Francis, Hankey and so on, so bringing their water needs into the debate is a red herring and is irrelevant conflation. Despite his claims that it is easy to blame Mother Nature, and there is not enough rain to keep our local dams in the safe zone, he is incorrect. The dams would almost always be in the safe zone if it wasn’t for our municipality’s inability to protect this vital resource.
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