Picture: Pixabay
Background: Chris Heymans1 (below)
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For months now, the water and sanitation (WSS) unit of eThekwini (Durban) municipality has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Once the pearl in the crown of South African urban WSS services, with a global reputation less than ten years ago for its efficiency, impressive improvements and broadening of service citywide, the city is now the subject of a national Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) assessment to identify and address the causes of a collapse of services in the greater metro.
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For months now, the water and sanitation (WSS) unit of eThekwini (Durban) municipality has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Once the pearl in the crown of South African urban WSS services, with a global reputation less than ten years ago for its efficiency, impressive improvements and broadening of service citywide, the city is now the subject of a national Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) assessment to identify and address the causes of a collapse of services in the greater metro. This has caused severe outages and protests in areas like Verulam, Tongaat and Phoenix, among others. Former city manager Michael Sutcliffe ascribed the reason for these protests to the city’s not being sufficiently open about the issues, leading to frustration levels going “through the roof”.
Addressing members of some of the most affected communities recently, DWS minister Senzo Mchunu pledged his personal attention and that of a dedicated team to help pinpoint the problems, with the first major alleviating steps to be announced in the course of February. With the findings and recommendations of this national government assessment imminent, let’s put this story and its wider messages for urban WSS services in South Africa in context, ie, what has gone wrong, and what are the fundamentals for addressing the issues in South African cities?
eThekwini could be a significant pointer, given the city’s global reputation so recently, which included receiving the “Oscar” of WSS providers, the prestigious Stockholm Industry Water Award, in 2014. At the time, the jury for the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) described eThekwini as “one of the most progressive utilities in the world”, marked by its “open approach to experimenting and piloting” new technical and social service delivery solutions for utility-run services, and thus being “a sterling example” for others worldwide.
And, at the time, well-deserved this praise indeed was. Established in 1992, as South Africa’s transition away from apartheid evolved, the new eThekwini WSS unit worked with major global and local WSS and development actors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank and the University of KwaZulu-Natal. It earned a global reputation for excellence and innovation, with its methods replicated widely – even beyond South Africa – as it shared practical knowledge and lessons on governance and service delivery.
As recently as 2016, a study of 17 African water service providers identified eThekwini as one of the five primary performers, known for its pragmatic, creative approaches to rolling out more and improved services in major cities. What made this especially significant was that Durban’s administrative boundaries were rapidly increased after democratisation in 1994, requiring investment also in poorly serviced rural areas at the city’s outskirts.
The WSS unit – supported by the city’s political leadership at the time – identified and tackled with vigour the complex political, institutional, financial, spatial and demographic challenges of transition. Its innovative dual approach included using the post-apartheid equitable share grant to provide WSS at no cost to poor families, alongside cost recovery from better-off water users elsewhere in the city.
It is difficult to reconcile that upbeat assessment with the despair today that marks the water crisis and the associated sanitation risks that endanger the health and social safety of vast parts of eThekwini, and that has damaged its reputation as a holiday attraction. Typically, such a decline in the fortunes of a city and its service delivery departments would be blamed on lack of funds, skills and integrity of governance. Hence, early indications are that the DWS and National Treasury may add conditions to any support that would seek to address these issues and not merely focus on financial investment.
The institutional framework for this is complex, though, and stretches far beyond eThekwini only. Former DWS director-general Mike Muller pointed out in Business Day on 3 March 2022 that although the water minister is legally mandated to set norms and standards, the key decisions require support from the National Treasury, cabinet colleagues and the local government association (SALGA), which may not be easy to achieve.
There has been an international trend to ring-fence WSS service provision through separate utility structures – often a public company, but sometimes also, in several cases, private contractors. The logic goes that this would secure water being managed on the basis of business principles. In South Africa, though, this has been controversial and has received strong opposition from trade unions, who see these moves as the privatisation of a public service. Hence, in the post-apartheid era, eThekwini became a leading – and internationally acclaimed – example of a “ring-fenced” service delivery unit. This enabled the water unit to focus on expanding and improving services in areas excluded from reliable services in the preceding apartheid era.
The unit leadership also had scope to mitigate institutional hurdles, even though it needed the consent of the city council. A cooperative, open relationship between the head of the unit, the mayor and key city councillors streamlined decision-making through pre-decision interactions that helped build mutual trust. This facilitated the WSS unit’s being a “semi-autonomous” entity within the municipal administration. During the 1990s up to around 2020, variations of this model emerged in some other municipalities, too.
But, of late, eThekwini and other municipalities have moved back to more political intervention in the daily business of the water units. By all accounts, this has made decision-making more protracted, and especially senior appointments more politically motivated, or subjected to political intervention in ongoing operational prioritisation or decision-making. It has not meant a change of manager of the water department, but has intrinsically made the water department less autonomous in the overall institutional framework. Firm as the unit leadership may aspire to be, experience worldwide has been that such political interference mostly has negative effects on service delivery.
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Perhaps the changes they try to implement could provide relief, but as minister Mchunu has highlighted, the decentralised framework confines the scope for national intervention. It will be unsustainable if national interference becomes embedded. But when a city government becomes quite as politically volatile as eThekwini is at the moment, it leaves even the best public officials, including the water department’s leadership and, in fact, the city, high and dry.
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The state of WSS services in greater eThekwini has clearly deteriorated, making the national minister and his department’s involvement a logical outcome. Perhaps the changes they try to implement could provide relief, but as minister Mchunu has highlighted, the decentralised framework confines the scope for national intervention. It will be unsustainable if national interference becomes embedded. But when a city government becomes quite as politically volatile as eThekwini is at the moment, it leaves even the best public officials, including the water department’s leadership and, in fact, the city, high and dry.
1 Chris Heymans is an independent advisor, specialising in the political economy of cities, urban development and water and sanitation. In 2016, he was team leader for a World Bank report, Providing water to poor people in African cities effectively: Lessons from utility reforms, in which Durban was a case study.
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