Corrigan: The water crisis is a political turning point

Key topics:South Africa’s water crisis worsens, exposing systemic governance failures.Water access linked to constitutional rights and social justice promises.Aging infrastructure, corruption, and mismanagement deepen public health risks..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox every morning on weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa's bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Terence Corrigan*.Dry taps, sometimes lasting for days (or weeks or months) are now a fact of life for many South Africans.On the face of it, South Africa’s water supply failures could seem like just another of the long list of crises afflicting the country. In a familiar pattern, public frustration is met with a mix of official hubris and bombast, which is in turn repaid with public cynicism. This has been the case with crime, with corruption, with collapsing municipal governance, and was for years the case with South Africa’s electricity supply.The water crisis is, however, different.Water was a deeply evocative political issue during the transition. It is a life-giving element, something each person needs, though in 1994 it was estimated that some 16 million South Africans lacked access to potable water. Ensuring that each person had what they so fundamentally needed would be emblematic of the superior morality of the new society. Bringing this about was the mandate that the African National Congress assumed for itself.From this came the inclusion of socio-economic and environmental rights in the final constitution. These drew up entitlements that went beyond the civil and political liberties – bodily integrity, free speech and so on – and imposed positive duties on the state to provide the country’s people with a range of goods and services. This was groundbreaking at the time.In an early exposition of this position, the late Prof Kader Asmal and his collaborator Robert Suresh Roberts wrote in the Mail and Guardian:“The final constitution should go further than the interim document does in placing certain fundamental human rights beyond the reach of expediency.“Job security, a reliable and unpolluted supply of water, an environment that is cleaned up at the expense of those who profit through dirtying it – these are not just nice things, they are fundamental rights and should be constitutional ones.”This was a view of the post-apartheid society and the regime that would constitute it that many outside the ANC’s immediate orbit – social activists, intellectuals, human rights advocates, religious leaders – found enticing. The franchise, and freedoms “from”, would be hollow without socio-economic upliftment. Making these the objects of constitutional entitlements held out the prospect of guaranteeing their realisation..Added gravity.Prof Asmal was post-apartheid South Africa’s first minister responsible for water (Minister of Water Affairs and Forestry, as it was then), a role in which he, to all outward appearances, excelled. He was an erudite proponent of this vision – an interventionist state using a new set of constitutional tools to sweep aside the iniquities of the old order and to birth the justice of the new – and an articulate apologist for the ANC as the vehicle to bring this about. That South Africa was a water-stressed country, and that environmental concerns were crystallising as part of a broader “progressive” agenda, added gravity to his role.Under his tenure, South Africa’s entire water management system was reconfigured, the centrepiece of which process was the National Water Act of 1998. Water rights were separated from rights in land, and water was brought under state custodianship. The state would take responsibility for ensuring that water was rationally and prudently used, with priority given to ensuring human wellbeing and environmental sustainability. Key to this was the concept of the quantity of water from a given source needed to satisfy “basic human needs” and preserve aquatic ecosystems, before any other considerations.These efforts – and the sentiments behind them, placing the greater social good ahead of commercial considerations – were recognised globally. In 2000, he was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize, his biography on its website reading: “Kader Asmal is the law professor who in 1998 rewrote his country’s water laws, having already paved the way for a range of water reforms that would benefit the poor black population of South Africa, and not only the rich, mostly white community. In his action plan, Professor Asmal linked water issues in a natural way to the three key concerns of his efforts in earlier years: human rights, social justice and environmental sustainability.”The legislative merits of the legislation aside, such plaudits would be unthinkable today. Not only is this illustrated daily by news coverage of water outages and community demonstrations, sewage spills and the contamination of agricultural lands, but in the data released by the state itself..Signalling dysfunction.The Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation provides tracking of the water system through its “Drop” reports, the latest iterations of which were published in 2023. Its Blue Drop report measures the quality and safety of drinking water and water management across the country’s municipalities. To achieve “Blue Drop” status, a supply system must score more than 95% on a number of indicators; in 2023, of the 958 such systems reviewed, only 26 (under 3%) were so designated. Meanwhile, 277 (29%) were in “critical” condition, signalling dysfunction across their operations.The Green Drop report examines management of wastewater, and thus has a focus on environmental impact. Of the country’s 1,003 Wastewater Treatment Works (across 144 Water Services Authorities), only 8% were ranked low-risk, and 24% medium-risk. By contrast, 34% were viewed as the high-risk, and 34% as critical risk. In other words, two thirds of treatment works posed an elevated risk to the aquatic environment, not to mention the health of those dependent on them.The No Drop report, meanwhile, interrogates the efficiency of water use by municipalities. This took as its starting point the country’s 144 Water Services Authorities (WSAs). Of these, in 2023, 24 did not submit information to the study. Of the remaining 120, 4 were deemed excellent, and 8 good – together, 10% of the total for which information had been submitted. Some 43, or just over a third of the WSAs that had submitted information, were rated as average, functional though with much room for improvement. The remaining 54% were ranked poor to critical (and those that had not submitted can be assumed to fall into this group too).Perhaps most revealing was the No Drop report’s findings non-revenue water (NRW). NRW is water that had been prepared for distribution, and put into the municipal supply system, but which is in some way “lost“, as a result of faulty infrastructure (by a significant margin the most significant cause), inaccurate billing and illegal tapping. In South Africa this amounted to a staggering 47%, accounting for 2.08 million m³, against 2.31 million m³ that actually found its way properly to consumers. Infrastructure failings accounted for about 80% of NRW. (For comparison, NRW accounts for about 30% of water distributed globally.).“Deteriorated significantly”.Last year, in a presentation to Parliament, the Department conceded: “The quality of drinking water in South Africa had deteriorated significantly, with the percentage of water supply systems failing microbiological safety standards increasing from 5% in 2014, to 46% in 2023. This decline posed a serious public health risk, heightening the likelihood of waterborne diseases such as cholera and chronic diarrhoea.”Tragically, this is a state of affairs that has been developing for decades. Already in the 1990s, muted concerns were being voiced about failings in municipal infrastructure; letters to editors and occasional media exposes showed irate suburbanites bemoaning broken pipes and flooded yards. The response was invariably a shrug of the shoulders, and the suggestion that the new government had to prioritise those who had been ill-served in the past.By the mid-2000s, the deeper, structural nature of the problem was coming into focus. Prof Asmal had been correct to draw attention to the dual imperatives of expanding access and to protecting the country’s limited water resources; but not enough had been done to expand the bulk infrastructure. More seriously, existing assets were running down. The burst pipes previously complained about were a harbinger of something much more serious. Equally troubling was the erosion of technical and engineering skills, which meant that a growing number of jurisdictions simply didn’t have the people needed to understand let alone maintain their water systems.To this would be added escalating infrastructural costs through empowerment premiums and the ever more vicious bite of corruption. The term “water mafia” came to refer to those who profited off the collapse of water supply systems to roll in tankers to pick up the demand – all at hefty fees to municipalities.Respected water scientists, such as Prof Anthony Turton and Prof Mike Muller (himself a former director general of the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry), raised their concerns, but to little avail. Prof Turton found that making his concerns public – at a scientific conference – would lead to his expulsion from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.By the end of the 2010s, failures of supply and compromised water quality were widely recognised realities, and had become a source of recurrent frustration. A 2016 large community survey found that when asked about the five most important challenges, a “lack of safe and reliable water supply” was by far the most commonly named, ahead of “violence and crime”, “inadequate housing”, “cost of electricity” and “lack of or inadequate employment opportunities”..Shaped by choices.This is the background. Not an act of nature – however much South Africa faces a hard climate, which threatens to become ever more unforgiving – but one shaped by choices, and a failure, or an inability to live up the expansive promises that had been made at the country’s democratic dawn. As the late John Kane-Berman, former CEO of the Institute of Race Relations (IRR), remarked in a 2020 commentary: “The country’s major problem is less a shortage of water than the manner in which its admittedly limited supplies of water are managed, or rather mismanaged. Like our electricity crisis, our water crisis is man-made.”There is a deeply political significance to this. Environmental NGO Greenpeace, not always the most reliable source, but one which shares the assumptions that animated South Africa’s water legislation put it thus: “Here’s what’s most frustrating: South Africa has the laws and frameworks to prevent this. The Constitution, in Section 27, guarantees the right to access water and a safe environment. The National Water Act and Water Services Act clearly spell out government responsibilities. International treaties, including the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, also enshrine water as a human right. But laws on paper mean little when they’re not enforced in real life. For millions of South Africans, these rights are invisible.”Meanwhile, public faith in the South African state as it currently exists – and in the political class represented by the ANC – has collapsed. Endless promises to do better lack credibility, as do comments like those of Premier Panyaza Lesufi that he too suffers from water outages – and even has to visit a hotel on occasion for a shower. “We also go through the same inconveniences as any other person,” he explained. The hubris of this should beggar belief, but by now it doesn’t.South Africa’s water crisis is not an inconvenience, it is existential. Not only for the country’s people, but for the ideas that have animated its approach to governance. The ongoing failure of the water system has demonstrated that the most high-minded commitments cannot be made real without the capacities and resources to enable them. After a brief honeymoon in the 1990s, this became ever less plausible as growth was undermined by a burdensome policy environment and administration was overwhelmed by politics and ideology..South Africa’s misfortune.Hence the significance of this moment. It has been South Africa’s misfortune to have had this agenda represented by the ANC, which chose a course of action that has ultimately collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, dragging much of the country with it. If it could ever make a credible argument that it was sacrificing growth or prosperity or non-racism for social justice, it can’t make that claim anymore. It’s doubtful the ANC can ever recover. The water crisis has drowned it.The question is whether the country can recover. The IRR warned when the Constitution was written that including socio-economic rights would create the risk of discrediting the whole order if they could not be delivered. In view of what has happened with South Africa’s water supply, this remains a risk today..*Terence Corrigan is the Project Manager at the Institute, where he specialises in work on property rights, as well as land and mining policy..*This article was originally published by Daily Friend and has been republished with permission.

Corrigan: The water crisis is a political turning point

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