South Africa’s water supply has emerged as a key strategic threat to the country, and a major political issue ahead of the upcoming local government elections. However, President Cyril Ramaphosa has assured the country that the government is taking this challenge seriously.

"The country is looking to us to secure an uninterrupted supply of water to all citizens, businesses and institutions, now and into the future," he declared at a meeting of the President's Coordinating Council in Ekurhuleni, held last week.

The President described the state of water provision as an emergency.

At the meeting, he laid out a plan that would ring-fence funds to ensure ongoing maintenance, hire qualified staff, combat corruption, and ensure a coordinated response across the various spheres of government.

Praising the record of successive post-apartheid administrations in providing access to water (the 2022 Census found that more than 82% of households had piped water in their living quarters or yard), the president nevertheless acknowledged that the reliability of service and the quality of water was deteriorating.

He pointed to the state of local government as a primary culprit: “For too long, many municipalities have struggled to provide the basic services citizens deserve due to weak revenue bases, deep skills shortages, and a complex, fragmented system that overwhelms even the best-intentioned leaders. This has resulted in a widespread crisis, with crumbling infrastructure, chronic water and electricity disruptions, and under-maintained roads.”

He added that the country’s eight metropolitan municipalities were losing on average 34% of their water before it could be billed. In some of them, the losses came close to 50%. He further pointed to the sharply escalating municipal debt to the country’s water boards, a situation that denoted a serious financial crisis.

The President said that considerable progress had been made in terms of Operation Vulindlela, a programme aimed at economic and infrastructure reform. These included passing new legislation, such as the National Water Resource Infrastructure Agency Act, and clearing the backlog of water-use applications.

He appealed to those assembled – representatives of national, provincial, and local government – to cooperate in dealing with these matters. Referring to the need to professionalise the administration, he said that it was important that appointments should be made on merit and not “whether somebody is popular in a particular political party or not”.

For the president and the African National Congress – as the country’s dominant party – this has become a political problem. Water disruptions in the country’s economic centres are imposing an economic cost on the cities that should be South Africa’s growth engines. They are also undermining liveability for their residents.

The mayoral candidate for the Democratic Alliance in Johannesburg, Helen Zille, has capitalised on this with high-profile media stunts, such as swimming in potholes and rowing a boat across a flooded roadway.

The water crisis represents a failure to take action when the problems were identified as long ago as the 1990s – at which point cities such as Johannesburg were already reporting sizeable water losses. Water expert Dr Anthony Turton attempted to raise the alarm at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in 2008 but was effectively hounded out of the institution for doing so.

Meanwhile, a tolerance of mediocrity, a sometimes-active hostility to meritocracy, and the penetration of state institutions by criminal organisations have created a situation in which many arms of the state are ill placed to respond positively and proactively and may even be resistant to doing so.