Water reform needs teeth

South Africa’s dams are almost full. At the end of June 2026, they stood at 96.6% of capacity. Despite consistently full dams, in 2025 nearly 28% of households endured water interruptions lasting more than 48 hours, and 20% went without water for a cumulative 15 days or more over the year. Thus, while South Africa doesn’t have water shortage, it definitely has a shortage of working systems to deliver it.

On 24 July President Cyril Ramaphosa released the National Water Action Plan. It sets out a programme of short, medium and long-term steps meant to fix water supply, backed by a new committee called Watercom, which he chairs. The plan says the right things and is big on promises. Whether it changes anything depends on what happens over the next six months.

The plan is strong on diagnosis. The Department of Water and Sanitation recorded non-revenue water at 47.3% in 2025. Municipalities lose or fail to bill for nearly half the water running through their pipes. Much of this comes down to unfixed leaks, unbilled connections and meters nobody reads. These two problems alone account for 74% of the water that never generates revenue. Fixing leaks and installing meters is not glamorous work, but it is the single most useful thing municipalities could do with the money they have.

The plan’s central proposal – ring-fencing water revenue, so it pays for water infrastructure instead of covering other municipal costs – targets this failure. Too many municipalities collect money for water and then spend it on salaries, debt repayments or unrelated projects, leaving nothing for the pipes and pumps that generated the income in the first place. If the newly formed Watercom can force municipalities to keep water money for water, that alone would mark a meaningful improvement.

The trouble is that South Africa has tried committees before. The plan compares itself to the turnaround at Eskom, and Mr Ramaphosa drew that comparison directly, saying government would apply to water “the same approach” that ended load shedding. But Eskom is one entity with one board and one chief executive. Water is delivered through more than 140 separate municipalities, each with its own council, its own procurement processes and, in many cases, its own patronage networks protecting the people responsible for the failures the plan is meant to fix. Coordinating one utility is not the same task as fixing 140 different ones at once.

The state of those municipalities is not encouraging. The Auditor-General’s most recent review found that only 23 of 135 (17%) Water Service Authorities received a clean audit in 2024. The remaining 112 had findings ranging from mild compliance issues to outright disclaimers, where auditors could not even form an opinion on the numbers. A national committee without the power to remove failing managers, block further transfers to municipalities that keep failing, or refer theft and fraud for prosecution will struggle to change outcomes at scale. 

Money is not the missing ingredient either. Green Drop data on wastewater treatment show R34 billion in secured capital budgets against an estimated R13.3 billion needed to fix the country’s wastewater plants. And yet performance keeps getting worse. The number of wastewater plants rated “excellent” fell from 40 in 2011 to just 14 in 2024. Over the same period plants in a “critical state” rose from 317 to 396. Rising budgets and falling performance at the same time point to a problem with skills and management, not one that more funding will solve.

The Western Cape offers the clearest evidence of what actually works. It recorded a Green Drop score of 72% in 2024, the highest in the country, and received zero disqualifications. Its municipalities collect 94.5% of revenue owed for water services, well above the national figure. This is not because the province has more money. It is because its municipalities are run competently, staffed with people who have the right qualifications, and held to account when they fail. Any national plan that does not address and understand why some provinces manage their water systems well, and others do not, will end up treating symptoms rather than causes. 

There is also a basic safety gap the plan must confront. Water safety plans are meant to guarantee that drinking water is properly assessed for risk and monitored. Yet 49% of the country’s water systems have no such plan at all, and only 13% show meaningful implementation of the safety measures they do have on paper. This is not a technical footnote; it is the difference between safe drinking water and a public health risk for millions of households. 

The National Water Action Plan gets the diagnosis right. South Africa’s water crisis is a governance, policy, and ideology failure, not primarily an engineering one. But a correct diagnosis without an enforceable remedy is not a cure. If Watercom can withhold funding from municipalities that refuse to ring-fence water revenue, replace management at the worst-performing entities and make water safety plans mandatory rather than optional, this plan could mark a genuine turning point. If it cannot, South Africans should expect a repeat of what happened with the country’s electricity crisis in its early years: years of committees and frameworks before anyone with real authority made the hard calls needed to fix the underlying problem.

Article originally appeared here.