New water bill risks deepening the crisis - Anthea Jeffrey - Biznews

Anthea Jeffery
The water crisis South Africa has long faced is looming ever larger as persistent water shedding spreads from rural areas to Johannesburg and other metropoles. Water cut offs in some Joburg suburbs have lasted more than a month. Water tankers cannot meet demand and residents are desperate and angry.

In his 2026 State of the Nation Address last month, President Cyril Ramaphosa acknowledged that water outages had become one of the most pressing problems facing all South Africans. What, then, is the government’s solution?

According to Ramaphosa, a National Water Crisis Committee will be formed to “coordinate” a comprehensive response. Some R156bn will be allocated to water infrastructure over the next three years. In addition, the extensive top-down controls already contained in the Water Services Act of 1997 will be increased under the Water Services Amendment Bill of 2025. This Bill is now before the water and sanitation portfolio committee in the National Assembly for adoption, after citizens were given a scant four weeks to comment on its damaging terms.

Under the current Act, a “water services provider” (Joburg Water, for example) that supplies water to consumers needs the prior “approval” of the relevant “water services authority” (the City of Joburg, for instance). It must also enter into a contract with the City that spells out its delivery obligations and complies with the “compulsory conditions” the minister of water and sanitation already has the power to lay down.

Under the Bill, Joburg Water will still need the prior approval of the City of Joburg and a prior contract with it too. However, it will also have to obtain an “operating licence” from the Department of Water and Sanitation (DWS).

Many more cadres of the African National Congress (ANC) will doubtless be deployed to the DWS to implement this licensing system. Licences will be granted to water services providers with “prescribed minimum scores”, but it remains unclear how “minimum scores” will be computed, what licence conditions may be introduced, when and how licences will be subject to review or renewal, and what reporting requirements may be imposed.

A licensee that contravenes any of its licence conditions may be instructed to rectify these defects. Those that persistently fail to do so “must” have their licences revoked. However, the delivery of water services must nevertheless continue when revocation occurs. This is likely to impose impossible burdens on water services authorities such as the City of Joburg.

If Joburg Water has its licence revoked, the City of Joburg must ensure that potable water, for one, continues to be delivered on a daily basis to the city’s 6 million residents and all businesses too. Yet the City of Joburg will lack an operating licence and will be barred from doing so.

The City will then, it seems, be compelled to outsource the water services delivery function to some other entity. The Bill assumes that such an entity can readily be found, that it will be prepared to take on the burden of delivery for what is likely to be an uncertain period, and that it can be granted the necessary operating licence at short notice. The Bill does not say whether the City of Joburg – and all its ratepayers and residents – will have to bear the financial costs of this outsourcing arrangement, but this seems likely.

Breach of contract
Other complications will arise. Joburg Water will still have its contract with the City of Joburg under which it will still be obliged to deliver water services, even though the DWS has stopped it from doing so by revoking its operating licence. How is the resulting breach of contract by Joburg Water to be resolved?

In addition, Joburg Water is part of the City of Joburg, which has a constitutional right to provide certain water services and to administer them too. Requiring one part of a municipality to be “licensed” to perform what is in substance its own constitutional function is nonsensical. It also risks major constitutional disputes when municipal executive authority is subordinated to national administrative intervention.

There is also no need for the new licence for which the Bill provides. Under the current Water Services Act, all relevant service obligations are already covered in municipal bylaws and in the compulsory contract conditions the minister is empowered to lay down.

Moreover, if the City of Joburg fails to ensure adequate water delivery by Joburg Water, the minister already has the power to ask the Gauteng provincial administration to intervene. If this fails to bring about improvements, the minister already has the power to take over the water delivery function until deficiencies have been rectified.

What then will the new licensing system add? If anything, the supposed “remedy” that the Bill proposes – the compulsory revocation of Joburg Water’s operating licence – is likely to precipitate an even worse water delivery crisis.

More seriously still, the minister has had extensive powers to control and intervene since 1997, when the water Act was adopted. Yet these powers have done nothing to prevent or resolve the mounting water crisis. This is not surprising. The underlying reasons for delivery failures lie in skills shortages and financial mismanagement, which neither ministerial intervention nor a new licensing system can resolve.

The complex infrastructure involved in the capture, storage, transfer, treatment, and distribution of water needs constant and expert maintenance. However, this has faltered badly, as skilled engineers and other technical and managerial staff have been pushed aside to make way for the ANC’s deployed cadres and other employment equity appointees.

In 2021 the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation in the Presidency warned that “at least a third of the 144 municipalities that were water services authorities were regarded as dysfunctional and more than half had no, or very limited, technical staff.” Moreover, “out of 278 municipalities in South Africa, 202 were without civil engineers”.

This assessment seems too optimistic. In 2022 the South African Institution of Civil Engineering (Saice), in its “infrastructure report card”, found that almost all municipalities lacked engineers – and hence could no longer draw on their crucial “problem-solving skills and depth of knowledge.”

“Systems start to slip”
Other skills are badly needed too. In the words of Dr Sean Phillips, Director General of the DWS: “Water and wastewater treatment are technical, industrial processes. They need skilled operators, engineers, and managers who follow strict procedures. Where municipalities do not employ people with the right qualifications, systems start to slip. Maintenance is delayed. Standards are not met. Over time, infrastructure degrades and service quality drops.”

Limited revenue is also a major constraint. The 2019 Master Plan for water estimated that R90bn a year would be needed over the next decade to overcome the maintenance backlog and start meeting other needs. But, as Professor Anthony Turton of the University of the Free State points out, annual budgetary allocations are generally well below this sum. In addition, many municipalities either under-spend their budgets or fritter much of the money away, often through rampant tender corruption.

The Bill cannot address any of these reasons for South Africa’s growing water crisis. Poorly performing and often corrupt water services institutions that are critically short of engineering, technical, financial, managerial and other skills will not magically improve their performance once many more unnecessary and onerous rules have been added to the existing Act.

Nor will the revenue required for essential water services expand under the Bill. On the contrary, much of this money will instead be allocated to the salaries and benefits of the hundreds of additional cadres who will no doubt be appointed to administer the new licensing system.

The key need, rather, is to develop a far more effective model for water services provision. This, as Dr Phillips has recommended, should encourage competition between water services providers and incentivise companies to “supply cleaner water at a lower cost,” under clear regulations that are effectively enforced where necessary.

Municipalities which already have the capacity to provide efficient water services should be left to get on with the job. Where municipalities lack engineering, technical and other capacities, the solution lies not in more top-down bureaucratic control but rather in entering into effective public/private partnerships. These must be concluded under open and transparent tendering processes, freed from preferential procurement obligations and able to achieve “value-for-money” in every contract concluded. 

Other damaging policies contributing to water delivery failures must also be terminated. In addition to cadre deployment, these include race-based targets in employment, management, ownership and elsewhere. These fake transformation policies worsen skills shortages and encourage corruption. In addition, they benefit only a small and often politically connected black elite, while greatly harming the great majority of black South Africans.

It is time to call a halt to all these policies – and to abandon a Bill that is unnecessary and harmful. Instead, the focus must fall on developing the competitive, innovative and efficient water-delivery mechanisms for which South Africans are crying out.

Dr Anthea Jeffery holds law degrees from Wits, Cambridge and London universities, and is the Head of Policy Research at the IRR. She has authored 12 books, including Countdown to Socialism - The National Democratic Revolution in South Africa since 1994, People’s War: New Light on the Struggle for South Africa and BEE: Helping or Hurting? She has also written extensively on property rights, land reform, the mining sector, the proposed National Health Insurance (NHI) system, and a growth-focused alternative to BEE

https://www.biznews.com/sarenewal/new-water-bill-risks-deepening-the-crisis-anthea-jeffrey

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.