The National Treasury has an opportunity to rectify a severe flaw in our municipal legislation dealing directly with the provision of safe, clean water — yet, curiously, it has not taken it up in the amendments proposed to the Municipal Finance Management Act (MFMA), the first in 23 years.
The City of Tshwane is in the news for its failure to chlorinate waste water for more than three weeks, an omission that has culminated in more than 400 people falling ill with diarrhoea and related illnesses.
The deeper one gets into the story, the murkier it becomes: officials were warned by the national water & sanitation department as far back as February that the water emanating from the treatment plant was problematic. A plan was put together and submitted — but it was never implemented.
Then, in September, the supplier of chlorine to treat the waste water suddenly decided, mid-contract, that it wanted four times the amount it was being paid. After negotiations stalled it stopped providing the chlorine. No new contract was apparently sought, and reports indicate that officials at the treatment plant attempted to treat the water with swimming pool chlorine.
This is where it gets even stranger. Instead of stopping the unchlorinated water from entering the system (apparently a routine and ridiculously simple thing to do), the plant continued to pump untreated water into Tshwane’s supply system.
The story is truly wild.
In addition, Tshwane is known for supply chain management shenanigans linked to water: in 2023 five officials were suspended over the dodgy contract for upgrades to the Rooiwal treatment plant that was awarded to politically connected tenderpreneur Edwin Sodi. Incidentally, Tshwane also experienced a cholera outbreak in 2023, resulting in 29 deaths.
A number of investigations are now unfolding internally and externally into the latest saga. The place to start would instinctively seem to be the city’s notorious supply chain management division.
Legislative loopholes
Tragically, Tshwane is not unique in its handling of waste water: 67% of all municipalities have failing waste water treatment works, according to the latest Green Drop Report. It is a statistic that should alarm every South African.
The heart of the water woes across South Africa is not simply a matter of dodgy contracts, ill intent and malfeasance; the law doesn’t at present compel municipalities to manage the crisis as they should.
It comes back to the failure by municipalities to ring-fence revenue collected for water and sanitation to upgrade, maintain and build water infrastructure to meet demand.
Water & sanitation department director-general Sean Phillips has been raising this issue for years.
He tells the FM that the constitution allows for an equitable share of funding to go to municipalities to ensure that the poor and the indigent receive basic services for free.
One problem is that this allocation is handed to municipalities by the Treasury as an unconditional grant and that municipalities rarely use this money for its intended purpose. In this way crucial resources meant to maintain and build water and sanitation infrastructure are lost — a situation most severe in poorer rural municipalities.
Another problem is that the MFMA, put together in the early 2000s, does not at present have a provision to ring-fence money collected from ratepayers for water and sanitation.
“The MFMA says all the money must go into a central pot and only the council of the municipality can decide on its allocation through the budgeting process at a municipal level,” Phillips says. “What has happened is that almost all municipalities, apart from a few in the Western Cape, including Cape Town, vote that much of the revenue from the sale of water should be used for other things.”
Phillips says municipalities go through a detailed process of calculating water tariffs, following national department guidelines, to cover the cost of supplying water and maintaining infrastructure. “What is the point of doing that if the council can vote much of the revenue for other things?” Phillips asks.
In this way councils can divert money meant to keep clean water in the taps to anything else. Some allocate it to clinics and libraries, for instance, though these are provincial competences.
The Treasury is well aware of this problem; its metro trading services reform programme is meant to address it. Yet, at the same time, the draft amendments to the MFMA which were announced by finance minister Enoch Godongwana last week are silent on addressing this central crisis facing the country’s utilities sector.
It may be politically unpalatable to tell politicians what to spend crucial resources on — but this failure over decades has resulted in a looming water crisis across the country.
It is time to take hard decisions or risk municipalities having to deal with one water-linked crisis after another, so that the same politicians who express shock at the outbreaks of diseases do not resist the very thing that can turn the situation around.
Marrian is a political analyst with the Bureau for Economic Research
