Honourable Minister Majodina
Congratulations on your appointment as South Africa’s new minister of water and sanitation. All South Africans will be wishing you much strength in taking on what has become some of the county’s biggest challenges – not only to serve its people, but also to do so sustainably in preserving our natural resources. We trust that you will build on the considerable efforts and progress of your immediate predecessor, Honourable Senzo Mchunu, and Director-General Sean Phillips, towards recovery of the sector. They too, of course, would be the first to emphasise that much remains to be done, following their era of beginning a fresh transformation over the past few years.
South Africa’s post-1994 democratic transition demanded of the water sector to become inclusive. Our first post-apartheid water minister, Kader Asmal, was determined to achieve transition in this sector. South Africa became a global reference point when Minister Asmal won the prestigious Stockholm Water Prize in 2000, in recognition of his “unprecedented efforts in the development of vision, legislation and practice in the field of water management in South Africa”. The Stockholm Water Prize Committee recognised the minister’s leadership in initiating an overhaul of water management policy and practice, anchored in human rights, social justice and environmental sustainability. The National Water Act of 1998 hence personified the ending of the racial foundations of the country’s water management at all levels of government.
This new legislation prioritised human needs and ecological sensitivity over commercial or industrial uses, recognising “water-use rights”, with benefits for the poor. But the act also reflected the need for payment on a sliding scale, and provided for the poor to pay only what they can afford. By late 1998 the “Working for water” programme was employing 24 000 people in over 300 projects across the country, including clearing invading alien plant species. South Africa’s obligations for equitable water-sharing with neighbouring countries were also institutionalised, adding a critical dimension that had been absent in the apartheid era.
Our country’s new positive water reputation was again evident in 2014, when Durban’s eThekwini Water and Sanitation unit received the prestigious Stockholm Industry Water Award for its transformative and inclusive approach to providing water and sanitation. The then head of eThekwini Water and Sanitation, Neil MacLeod, highlighted the role of national policy in this success, including the South African Constitution’s enshrining access to water as a human right, which local governments were tasked to put into practice. Even when Durban expanded its administrative boundaries to include 3,5 million people – many living in poorly serviced rural areas – the municipality connected large numbers to piped water and provided access to toilets at no cost to poor families.
This presents you with an important entry point at the outset of your new assignment, demystifying the notion that only new infrastructure can solve the problems of limited access. Instead, maintenance, efficient water use, fixing leaks, repairing and improving dysfunctional water and wastewater treatment plants, and setting financially sustainable tariff levels alongside fiscal support to enable the poor to pay for water are all pivotal matters to address. This will require DWS to work continuously with the Department of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs (CoGTA), National Treasury (NT) and others to address underperformance, illegal water use, municipal debt and other operational, financial and policy challenges. Spending and new physical investment can add sustainable value only if the enabling governance, accountability and institutional environments – and requirements for maintenance – are further strengthened.
You will know, however, that although Minister Mchunu took up these issues, much institutional and physical rebuilding still needs to be done as the reliability of water supply and sanitation services has fallen vastly due to weaker operation and maintenance and declining financial resources. There has been declining payment for water services, rising municipal debt, unreliable service provision, and failing municipal wastewater management, leading to increased pollution of rivers and other sources and higher health risks. It has also created space for the rise of criminal syndicates – such as tanker mafias – which escalated in the lockdown era, ostensibly delivering water to communities that lacked connections, but in reality, often did not deliver anything at all, or near the levels they were being paid for.
In contrast to a growing practice in many countries, South Africa has consistently not created a ringfenced water regulator. Fortunately, even the more limited regulatory process of resuscitating the Blue, Green and No Drop reports in late 2023 already provide a useful shift, providing informative, concrete data on the state of water supply system (WSS) services at municipal level, and guidance on reform priorities and strategies. The politics of doing so has, however, long been a sensitive matter in South Africa and is likely to remain so. As the new minister, you may be well advised to consider further evolution towards broadened regulation, and garnering data to support your ministry’s approach and priorities.
The current DWS leadership at least seems clearer in its messaging about reform, including the value that the private sector could add. This will remain a delicate political space for you to move into, as political reservations about private sector water services delivery are deeply entrenched. Moving in that direction will require political skill, and may continue to require much compromise and deliberation. To manage this requires going case by case, responding to each municipality’s own acknowledgements that they are struggling to fulfil their water and sanitation mandate.
Quite frankly, though, although there have been isolated cases – such as at Mbombela – of private contractors making a very real difference to the scale and quality of service delivery, and quite specifically where they brought improved services to poor communities, South Africa is lagging well behind the progress that public-private partnerships have brought in many countries. Where a public-private sector partnership may not be possible, municipalities can benefit from more clearly ringfencing the water (and some other) functions to assign responsibility more clearly and holding the unit and staff more specifically accountable for water and sanitation or other specific functions.
The technical know-how of municipal staff and leadership varies immensely among metros, and even more so in smaller municipalities. Data from the South African Institute of Civil Engineering (SAICE) shows that substantial numbers of engineers have left South Africa in recent years. It is common knowledge nowadays that many municipalities have lost and failed to replace engineers in different infrastructure fields, and water and sanitation has been among the services most affected by this trend. This continues to jeopardise service delivery and infrastructure maintenance, and complicates the trade-offs and prioritisation needed to run local governments and the services they must deliver.
Political divisions at municipal level have also deepened, so that there has been a demise of pragmatic assessment of problem areas and collaborative design of strategies to resolve them. Opportunistic coalitions have become commonplace, often breaking up or realigning around personalities or uncompromising political positions.
In such an environment, private investors and service providers may not exactly rush to smaller urban areas and their hinterlands. Addressing this will require a hybrid of approaches: combining public-private collaboration; technological innovation beyond conventional toilet and treatment systems; and fit-for-purpose contextual interventions.
All of these matters require thinking out of the box and clear lines of accountability as the different spheres of government engage with one another, with communities and households, and with the private sector and trade unions. This will affect the services not only strategically and technically, but also financially. Public willingness to pay for poor services, and weak billing and revenue management have severely damaged water management. The political resistance to some of the measures applied in many other countries – such as the use of prepaid meters – has deprived South Africa’s water service providers of resources that have become more common in a growing range of countries.
All South Africans will wish you great success in your new role. We all have a stake in your role and your success, for meeting our most basic needs at home, at school or work, in our economic sectors, and in our regional or international relations.
Chris Heymans is an independent adviser specialising in the political economy of cities, urban development and water and sanitation service delivery.