Water action plan delay highlights real crisis: government inaction

Despite indications that the presidency’s National Water Action Plan has been finalised, the plan has still not been released to the public. AfriForum is of the opinion that the continued delay predicts that implementation will be this plan’s greatest weakness.

The Minister of Water and Sanitation, Pemmy Majodina, informed Parliament on 1 June that the National Water Action Plan includes reforms relating to accountability, infrastructure maintenance, asset management, financial sustainability, water conservation, support for struggling municipalities, alternative service delivery models and anti-corruption measures. This suggests that the plan has been developed to the point where members of the executive are able to publicly summarise its contents. However, to date the plan has not been released to the public.

The presidency’s failure to publish the plan without a good reason, only fuels uncertainty and undermines public confidence that the government is dealing with the water crisis with the urgency it requires.

AfriForum stresses that the promised interventions echo what it and other oversight institutions, engineers and water experts have been recommending for years. For example, these priorities closely mirror findings contained in the Auditor-General’s recent report on South Africa’s water sector, which identified poor maintenance, weak accountability, inadequate institutional capacity and poor coordination as the root causes of the crisis.

AfriForum has written to the presidency to demand clarity regarding the unexplained delay in publishing the plan, despite repeated commitments by President Cyril Ramaphosa that it would be completed and released.

“Government’s own independent constitutional watchdog has already investigated the crisis, identified the responsible institutions and provided a roadmap for corrective action. If government agrees with those findings, it should implement them. If it disagrees, it should explain why. What it cannot do is continue hiding behind another committee and another delayed action plan while communities continue to suffer the consequences of failing water services,” says Marais de Vaal, AfriForum’s Advisor for Environmental Affairs.

The organisation argues that the failures that caused the country’s water crisis, as well as the corrective measures to solve them, are well documented. However, citizens are increasingly seeing a pattern in which government responds to crises by announcing new committees, task teams, indabas, interventions and action plans while implementation remains absent.

“The concern is not a knowledge deficit, but an implementation deficit. Government increasingly creates the appearance of action instead of action itself. Communities without water do not need another committee or action plan. They need leaking pipes repaired, wastewater works fixed, infrastructure maintained and officials held accountable for failures,” says De Vaal.

If you want to support AfriForum’s efforts to hold government accountable for failing water and sanitation services, visit https://afriforum.co.za/en/we-will-do-it-ourselves/water-crisis-portal/  for more information.