Little hope for fixing South Africa’s drying taps

Reading President Cyril Ramaphosa’s weekly letter to the nation yesterday, one was tempted to ask: Where is our president and what have you done with him?

That’s because, in the entire missive dealing with what he acknowledged as a national crisis, Ramaphosa never once used the ANC’s favourite excuse word: “challenges”.

He said, in uncharacteristic bluntness: “We must acknowledge that in too many municipalities, government has not succeeded with the maintenance of infrastructure, to manage water services properly and to respond with sufficient urgency. Parts of our country are experiencing worsening water shortages and deteriorating water quality. In some places, ageing water infrastructure has collapsed.”

He reiterated the promises he made in his State of the Nation Address – the most noteworthy being that those civil servants and municipal managers responsible for water disasters would be held accountable.

In other words, proper performance management…

However, we have misgivings about Ramaphosa’s creation of yet another state-owned enterprise (SOE) – the National Water Resources Infrastructure Agency Limited – to deliver us from the evil of a crumbling water supply system.

The entity would be, effectively, another Eskom, providing water, rather than electricity.

We all know how Eskom has gone, so forgive us if we don’t start cheering just yet.

The idea is that the agency will take over all water infrastructure and use the revenue and asset value from that to negotiate private investment, or public-private partnerships, to replace or update infrastructure.

Whether this amounts to a quiet sort of privatisation remains to be seen – but the private sector won’t get involved in this unless there is money to be made.

This seems like a possible new place for comrades to be deployed and, given the example of the country’s other SOEs – most of which are abject failures – that does not fill us with optimism.