National government, provincial governments and municipalities are not only fooling the public, they are also fooling themselves.
While Gauteng’s water crisis – no longer looming as Johannesburg implements water restrictions – has the most coverage in South Africa’s media, small-town South Africa has been left to dry up like a dehydrated kudu in the Northern Cape sun.
A 2022 ministerial presentation to Parliament on the state of water and sanitation infrastructure in Mpumalanga noted that municipalities are simply “failing to [perform] the functions of a Water Service Authority (WSA)”.
An IRR report authored by my colleagues Makone Maja and Anlu Keeve states that “municipal mismanagement is a prominent driver of the national average Non-Revenue Water (NRW) losses.”
Municipal annual reports, where most of the information can be found, read like a box-ticking exercise, with little-to-no due diligence done on the figures cited (this author has found issue with figures provided or responses by the executive in multiple documents).
It also does not correspond with the reality of residents on the ground, who continue complaining to ward councillors about their lack of water, which in some cases has gone on for months without end.
The Constitution entitles South Africans to access to water. The above-mentioned presentation also notes that the number of complaints to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) has increased as municipalities fail to ensure serviceable infrastructure.
Not that a complaint to the SAHRC would spur municipalities into action.
“More allocation required”
The Minister of Water and Sanitation, Pemmy Majodina, was recently quoted as saying the government needs R90 billion to restore South Africa’s water infrastructure to a working condition.
Money is not the true problem. The lack of infrastructure and maintenance is. How else is 48% of all the water that Rand Water provides lost?
The Minister is half-right when she says that Gauteng’s water woes are self-inflicted. Years of under-investment and underspending on infrastructure development and maintenance have led to Africa’s economic powerhouse being without water. Yet residents have contributed billions in rates and taxes. For what exactly?
“Water is Life”
A common theme throughout departmental presentations, “water is life” rings hollow for millions of South African residents. They don’t have water, so they don’t have life.
The DWS’s annual allocation for the Vaal Major System Storage, where Rand Water and ultimately municipalities get their water from, has been over-abstracted by nearly 200 million cubic metres. Johannesburg, Emfuleni and Tshwane are all exceeding their daily consumption target.
The City of Gold is currently using more than double the amount of water Capetonians were using, when its water system nearly collapsed in the 2017 water crisis.
In a recent Cabinet meeting, Minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshaveni noted that the President will establish a National Water Crisis Committee to “develop a water action plan and bring in water experts” to address the crisis.
The DWS has also established a War Room “to oversee mitigation measures and provide support” to municipalities. This is unnecessary, because the department knows the causes of water shortages: the lack of infrastructure and municipal failures in revenue collection.
Crisis committees and war rooms cannot make up for the decades of failure to ensure that municipalities address their infrastructure challenges.
More tomfoolery.
Municipalities have lost institutional capacity at an alarming rate. For example, the Mogale City Local Municipality which encompasses Krugersdorp had a 45% vacancy rate in its Infrastructure Department in 2022/23.
It currently has sewage spewing out into the Vaal River, attributed directly to failures in maintenance. The SAHRC has known since at least February 2021 that the Vaal River pollution levels have violated residents’ constitutional rights.
But – as has become commonplace – nothing was done. This also illustrates the limits of Chapter 9 institutions. If municipalities cannot or do not want to address the problem, the Commission can only plead with government to ensure the problems are addressed.
Small tax bases, low growth
A common thread running through Gauteng and Mpumalanga municipalities (and countless others) is their acknowledgement of high unemployment rates, heavy reliance on social grants, low economic growth rates and small tax bases, yet none have tangible solutions to get their residents into work.
As part of the Thaba Chweu Local Municipality’s strategic objective of economic development and growth, it identified a key performance area of Local Economic Development (LED), like all other municipalities. Interestingly, none of the performance indicators used to measure the effectiveness of LED include a target of jobs created or number of people lifted out of poverty – a problem area listed under the local economic development objective.
Instead, the municipality measures its strategic objectives by the number of tourism projects implemented and meetings of the local economic development forum.
Without manpower to address infrastructure challenges, municipalities can’t tackle the needs of residents, businesses and tourists. The result is a socio-economic catastrophe for residents, who end up voting with their feet by moving to more economically active urban centres. Rural towns are left to decay and the people who call it home are forgotten.
Staging an intervention
The challenges small-town South Africa faces are not insurmountable, but if municipalities are going to sit on their hands and wait for help, people may wait forever. Ensuring residents have acceptable basic services by spending grant allocations as effectively as possible, building relationships with the private sector and getting the community involved through effective communication of priorities are some of the ways to get started.
The rest will follow.
[Image: Jonas KIM from Pixabay]
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