South Africa Blames Its Water Crisis on the Municipalities

SOUTH AFRICA · INFRASTRUCTURE

The South Africa water crisis is caused by deep structural problems at municipal level, President Cyril Ramaphosa told parliament on 25 August, in a statement that named two failures, no municipality, and not a single number.

What the President said about the South Africa water crisis

Answering questions in the National Assembly on Tuesday 25 August, Ramaphosa identified two specific structural failures and only two. The first is that many municipalities fail to ring-fence revenue from water sales and reinvest it in water provision.

The second is the absence in most municipalities of a proper separation between the water services authority and the water services provider. In plainer terms, the body that is supposed to hold the service to account is often the body delivering it.

He pointed to the National Water Action Plan as the remedy, developed after consultation with municipalities, water boards and departments, containing short-term interventions and longer-term legislative reform. Both it and the Energy Action Plan sit under Operation Vulindlela, the reform programme run jointly by the Presidency and the National Treasury.

Two forms of crime were named: theft of metal parts for sale as scrap, and what the President called the water tanker mafia, meaning operators who profit when piped supply fails. The full exchange is published on the government’s website.

The statement contains no figures at all

This is worth stating plainly, because a great deal of numerical material has been attached to the statement in circulation. No percentage, no rand figure, no municipality and no deadline appears in it.

Everything quantitative that belongs to this subject comes from elsewhere, on other dates, from other speakers. Attributing those numbers to the President’s answer would be a fabrication.

It is also worth noting who is speaking to whom. The widest-circulated account of the answer is the government’s own report of the government’s own performance, carried by the state news service, with no water board, analyst or community voice in it.

The audited data is worse than the diagnosis

The 2025 Green Drop report, released on 31 March 2026 and covering the 2023/24 municipal year, audited 848 wastewater treatment works. It found 396 of them, 47 percent, in critical condition, up from 334 or 39 percent in the previous round.

Systems rated excellent or good fell from 14 percent to 8 percent, and Green Drop certifications dropped from 22 to 14. Combining the poor and critical categories, 61 percent of works perform below the minimum.

Non-revenue water, the share entering municipal systems that generates no income, sits at about 47 percent nationally and has stabilised at that level rather than improving. The term covers leaks, theft, broken meters and bills that are never collected.

Municipal debt to water boards stood at about R25.6 billion (about US$1.6 billion) by August 2025, according to a parliamentary reply by Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina, against R22.36 billion (about US$1.4 billion) in June 2024. Those are two dates rather than two conflicting claims, and the direction is the point.

Copying the load-shedding playbook

The architecture is deliberately familiar. A presidentially chaired National Water Crisis Committee was established after the February 2026 state of the nation address, and the National Water Action Plan followed on 23 July, both under Operation Vulindlela.

That is the structure credited with ending years of rolling blackouts, known in South Africa as load-shedding, and the government’s confidence rests openly on the analogy. It is also where the argument is weakest.

Electricity in South Africa runs through one vertically integrated utility, Eskom. Water services are a constitutional local-government function delivered by 144 separate water services authorities, buying bulk supply from regional water boards.

A centralised method that worked on one utility does not obviously transfer to 144 municipalities with their own budgets, councils and elections. Nothing in the government’s account addresses that.

The money is real, and it is not close to the need

The government has committed more than R156 billion (about US$9.8 billion) in public funding to water and sanitation infrastructure over three years, and a R54 billion (about US$3.4 billion) incentive for the eight metropolitan municipalities to reform their water, sanitation and electricity services. Both were announced in the February 2026 state of the nation address.

Set against the need, those sums are modest. The water department’s long-standing estimate is that the country requires about R90 billion (about US$5.6 billion) of investment every year for a decade, while actual spending ran at roughly R17 billion (about US$1.1 billion) a year between 2018 and 2022.

Even the increased allocation of R69.3 billion (about US$4.3 billion) for 2023 to 2025 fell roughly R200 billion (about US$12.5 billion) short of the assessed target for that period, according to the South African Institution of Civil Engineering. The direction is not in dispute; the gap is.

Rand figures in this article are converted at R15.95 to the US dollar, the closing rate of 27 August 2026.

What the diagnosis leaves out

Ramaphosa named only municipal failures. Independent assessments add national-level causes he did not mention: chronic underinvestment in refurbishment, ageing bulk infrastructure, weak regulation by the national department itself, and the absence of an independent water regulator.

The framing is a political choice as much as a technical one, and local government elections are due between November 2026 and January 2027. Diagnosis and blame are not always separable in an election year.

The measurable test is straightforward. The next Green Drop, Blue Drop and No Drop audits will show whether the plan has changed anything, and the most recent audited data shows regression rather than improvement.

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