AfriForum urges public to comment on far-reaching National Water Amendment Bill
AfriForum calls on farmers, water users, businesses, civil society organisations and other interested parties to submit comments on the 2026 National Water Amendment Bill. This bill proposes some of the most significant changes to South Africa’s water legislation since the enactment of the National Water Act in 1998.
The stated objective of the bill is to promote transformation and more equitable access to water. However, AfriForum believes that Parliament should carefully examine whether the proposed amendments will address the real causes of unequal access to water. The organisation argues that the bill may simply aim to expand the powers of the department of Water and Sanitation (DWS) without taking into account nearly three decades of inadequate implementation of existing legislation.
The bill proposes, among other things, to strengthen the department’s powers to curtail existing lawful water use; prohibit private water trading; centralise the reallocation of water; repeal provisions relating to existing lawful water use; introduce race-based reservation of water allocations; and further regulate the governance and transformation of Water User Associations.
AfriForum will submit comprehensive comments focused on these aspects of the bill.
“Nearly three decades after the National Water Act came into effect, the department’s own data shows that approximately half of all Existing Lawful Water Uses (ELUs) have still not been verified and that only about 75% of irrigation boards have been transformed into Water User Associations,” says Marais de Vaal, AfriForum’s Advisor for Environmental Affairs.
“The department itself has also acknowledged that practical barriers – such as land tenure, financing, infrastructure, technical support, and licensing support – are the greatest obstacles in the transformation process. Therefore, before Parliament grants the even broader powers to the department, it should be asked why the existing statutory mechanisms have not been fully utilised and why the real bottlenecks have not been solved,” explains De Vaal.
According to AfriForum, the DWS’s justification for this bill rests heavily on the need for transformation of the water sector and the assumption that historical land ownership patterns resulted in an inequitable concentration of water rights. However, AfriForum warns that these arguments should be carefully tested against reliable and available evidence.
“Those assumptions also underpin the argument that ELUs remain concentrated because historical water rights were linked to land ownership. AfriForum’s latest report on land ownership shows that many of the commonly cited claims about land ownership in South Africa are all too often based on unscientific research and assumptions. The report shows that the so-called facts about land ownership are not as certain as claimed. Similarly, DWS itself has not yet completed an accurate verification process to determine the full extent of ELUs. It is, therefore, irresponsible to advance sweeping legislative reforms while the factual basis on which those reforms rest remains incomplete,” says De Vaal.
AfriForum maintains that while transformation is an important constitutional objective, it cannot justify legislative amendments that have no identifiable connection to the problems it seeks to solve. Creating new powers to reserve or reallocate water on racial grounds, while the underlying constraints remain unresolved, will undermine both transformation and efficient water use.
The public has until 30 July 2026 to submit comments. Written submissions can be emailed to Nosipho Bavuma at pcws@parliament.gov.za.
