South Africa’s Water Crisis: Why the Pipes are Bursting and the Politicians are Still Talking

Three and a half years ago, in October 2022, I sat down with Dr Anthony Turton for a long, technical conversation on my YouTube channel. Turton is a water-resources engineer and former principal scientist at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. My background is in civil engineering and even though I am not practising in water resource management, I thought I had enough theoretical know-how to get the message across.

What Dr Turton laid out that afternoon was not political commentary but a precise, data-driven diagnosis of South Africa’s water system. In February 2026 the same numbers still hold: Rand Water is operating at hydraulic capacity, strategic reservoir retention times in Gauteng have dropped to between 15 and 19 hours during peak summer demand, and non-revenue water losses remain stubbornly high. The crisis is not primarily about rainfall. It is the result of a mismatch between engineered infrastructure and the institutions now responsible for running it.

After the 1994 transition the removal of influx-control laws triggered an unprecedented wave of rural-to-urban migration. Millions of people, understandably, moved to the cities in search of opportunity that Apartheid denied them. Urban water demand jumped sharply while the bulk supply system, dams, treatment works, pump stations, and pipelines remained sized for the 1994 baseline. No corresponding expansion of source works or conveyance capacity took place at the required scale. The system suddenly carried a much heavier load without any increase in its design limits.

Water Legislation

Then, in 1998, Parliament passed the National Water Act, one of the most ambitious pieces of water legislation anywhere. It abolished private water rights and declared the state custodian of every drop. Every significant user – farmer, mine, factory – now required a time-limited water-use licence backed by detailed hydrological studies. The Department of Water and Sanitation was expected to administer this new regime, yet it never built the necessary technical capacity: enough hydrologists, modellers, licensing officers, and enforcement staff. New investment in storage and transfer schemes slowed while legal uncertainty grew.

The moment of truth arrived in 2002. The first scientifically rigorous National Water Resource Strategy used standard desktop reserve determination methods to calculate available yield across all major catchments. Nationally, 98 percent of the long-term mean annual runoff – after setting aside the ecological reserve – was already allocated. In several river systems, allocations exceeded sustainable yield by up to 120 percent. From an engineering perspective, the country had reached the firm-yield ceiling of its existing storage and transfer infrastructure. Further growth in demand could now only be met by reallocation, efficiency improvements, or expensive new supply schemes.

At exactly the same time the country was confronting these allocation limits, operational competence in the water sector began to erode. Large numbers of experienced process engineers, operators, and maintenance technicians left water boards and municipalities.

Municipal boundary changes amalgamated smaller, better-managed entities with larger, weaker ones, diluting institutional memory. The constitutional principle of co-operative governance meant national government could not intervene directly in failing local wastewater treatment works, even when those works were discharging non-compliant effluent into strategic impoundments such as the Vaal Barrage and Hartbeespoort Dam.

Wastewater

Today the clearest symptom of the breakdown is municipal wastewater performance. Municipalities assumed ownership of treatment plants they were never equipped to run. Many facilities now operate well below design capacity because of chronic shortages of chemicals, electricity, and spares, combined with the loss of skilled operators needed to maintain activated-sludge processes and nutrient removal. The cumulative result is that roughly five billion litres of untreated or partially treated sewage enter surface water resources every day. That loading exceeds the assimilative capacity of rivers and reservoirs, driving up nutrient levels, promoting eutrophication, and raising the cost of downstream potable-water treatment.

The integrated bulk system itself is now operating with very little margin. Rand Water’s network is at or near maximum hydraulic throughput. Leakage rates have risen as large sections of pipe exceed their original 50-year design life without systematic replacement. Every heatwave simultaneously increases demand and evaporation, reducing effective storage, and tightening the supply-demand balance even further.

Dr Turton’s engineering perspective on solutions was characteristically pragmatic. Water, he reminded me, is not a finite stock but a flux that can be recovered and reused 1.6 to 2.0 times within a single catchment if the right treatment barriers are in place. Direct or indirect potable reuse schemes using multi-barrier advanced treatment – microfiltration, reverse osmosis, UV-advanced oxidation – offer one technically proven route. Fit-for-purpose quality standards would allow non-potable water for industrial cooling, toilet flushing, and irrigation, thereby reducing pressure on scarce potable supplies.

Seawater desalination via reverse osmosis has become cost-competitive for coastal cities at roughly 20 to 30 cents per kilolitre at scale. Pressure management, district metered areas, and performance-based private-sector participation in operations and maintenance could all be deployed relatively quickly once the institutional blockages are removed.

South Africa does not face hydrological scarcity in the absolute sense; annual rainfall patterns have not shifted dramatically. What it faces is an engineered system that has reached its design limits while the institutions charged with managing it have lost the capacity to maintain performance or implement the next generation of solutions. The 2002 National Water Resource Strategy gave us the quantitative baseline. Every engineering metric since then has simply confirmed the trajectory.

The full unedited interview, South Africa’sWater Crisis –In Conversation with Dr Anthony Turton , remains on my YouTube channel and you can watch it here. It is still the clearest technical explanation I have heard of how we got here – and what engineering and institutional steps are still available if we choose to take them.

The roots of this crisis are deeply political in South Africa, rooted in choices around governance, capacity building, and accountability that have long deferred the hard engineering realities. As a civil engineer, I am relieved that the water crisis has finally broken through onto the public and political agenda, especially with recent announcements such as the National Water Crisis Committee and infrastructure pledges. Voices like Dr Turton’s, and the technical community’s, are at last being heard more widely. But relief turns to cautious hope only if politicians now move beyond declarations to decisive to finally listen to those who have the expertise to solve the problem.

We do not need “foreign” advisers. The solutions already existed more than 20 years ago.