“The failure of local government to maintain infrastructure and supply drinking water is a violation of people’s human rights. They should not be allowed to continue in this vein. In another place, they would have been charged or fired.

“We cannot wait any longer to make sure that our water is secured. By 2030, it is estimated that there will not be enough water to deal with the increasing demand.”

This is according to Dr Ferrial Adam, the executive manager of the Water Community Action Network, an initiative of the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse.

GroundUp reported in November, citing statistics from the Department of Water and Sanitation’s water and sanitation data repository, that a third of South Africa’s water infrastructure is not fully operational, while two-thirds of municipalities cannot supply drinking water that adheres to the minimum drinking standards.

A statement released last month by the Academy of Science of South Africa ahead of the 2023 United Nations Water Conference underlined the significant water security challenges South Africa is facing, with poor water and sanitation infrastructure maintenance and investment, inequitable access to water and poor water quality highlighted.

According to the Constitution, South Africans have a right to safe and sufficient water. Local government is responsible for the provision of these water services under the Water Services Act, with the provincial and national governments responsible for monitoring these duties.

Prof Anja du Plessis, a water resource management research specialist from Unisa, told Caxton Local Media that despite significant progress, South Africa is still faced with numerous water resource challenges, and in some instances, has gone backwards instead of making positive progress.

“It has been widely published by researchers and the South African Institution of Civil Engineering that South Africa’s infrastructure is in a state of decay. In terms of water-related infrastructure, the current state is concerning as numerous reports show that water infrastructure has not been maintained, becoming mostly dysfunctional and not adhering to relevant legislation and policies.

“The current water crisis in the City of Johannesburg is a good example of the consequence of non-maintenance and upgrading of existing infrastructure. Then there is also poor governance, a lack of reactive planning and management, misappropriation of funds, lack of suitable human resources and skills, and continued blackouts, leaving the taps dry for varying periods of time, despite dams overflowing.”

In his budget speech last year, Water and Sanitation Minister Senzo Mchunu allocated R37.4b for conditional infrastructure grants for municipal water services over the next three years, with the grants to be spent on 313 different projects.

Du Plessis says ‘throwing more money at it’ won’t solve the problem.

“This will depend if the money is actually invested into these projects and does not disappear, which is what happened with the more than R3b that was spent on the Giyani water project and the more than R500m given to the eThekwini Municipality to address wastewater treatment works that were destroyed by the April 2022 floods. There are numerous other examples of water projects where the money given to address a specific problem was either not used or the projects went over budget, requiring more funding to address a specific problem.”

According to 2022 figures, the Water Trading Entity, which manages water infrastructure and resources in South Africa, was owed almost R25b from customers, with municipalities and water boards accounting for 65%.

Du Plessis says this plays a major role in the deterioration of water infrastructure in terms of the financial resources on which local municipalities depend to achieve their set mandates. These include maintaining, upgrading and developing new infrastructure to accommodate growing populations and settlements, and increasing water demand by various water-use sectors.

“Without the collection of revenue, local municipalities will find it difficult to address the major water infrastructure backlog that has been created over the past two decades. Therefore, the collapse of infrastructure is a legacy issue, created over two decades, where suitable maintenance, upgrading and development of existing and new infrastructure did not occur by the ruling party.

“A culture shift, moving towards transparency and holding water users to account needs to occur within the Department of Water and Sanitation, provincial governments and local municipalities to address the loss in revenue.

“South Africa can no longer afford to wait. Announced promises and plans by government departments need to move away from just talking to actual action and implementation of projects. Maladministration should be highlighted as a significant area of concern and suitable investigations need to occur. An independent regulator will have to be appointed to ensure that money does not disappear, that projects achieve the set aim and objectives within the given period and that expenditure does not exceed the allocated budget.”