Thobeka Ngema|Published
South Africa’s water crisis is under fresh scrutiny as a new national tracker assesses all 144 water services authorities against 85 indicators, amid mounting municipal debt, declining maintenance spending and concerns about failures in water governance.
The Water Rights Tracker (WRT), launched by the Claude Leon Chair in Earth Justice and Stewardship at the University of the Witwatersrand and the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), aims to identify service delivery gaps and strengthen accountability for the constitutional right to water.
The launch comes as R28 billion in municipal debt puts financial pressure on the water sector, straining water boards and threatening citizens’ access to water.
New tracker targets water governance failures
The WRT is designed to provide an evidence-based assessment of water services authorities, highlighting shortcomings in infrastructure maintenance, record-keeping, oversight and accountability.
SAHRC Commissioner Dr Henk Boshoff said the tracker would support gap analysis, promote accountability and provide an evidence-based foundation for solutions and advocacy.
“The WRT will assist citizens and communities to foster improved water governance and management in the water sector,” Boshoff said.
He said the tracker would strengthen the commission’s monitoring of the state’s fulfilment of its constitutional obligation to provide water, while promoting transparency and accountability.
It would also help the commission make targeted policy recommendations and use empirical evidence to address systemic challenges in the water sector.
Poor municipal records linked to weak performance
Professor Tracy-Lynn Field, Claude Leon Chair in Earth Justice and Stewardship, said the tracker would allow comparisons between water services authorities and help identify gaps.
“Everyone in South Africa has a right to sufficient water… We need to make sure that it’s realised across the country. Second, our debate must be around the systemic drivers of water services dysfunction. We must have evidence to support that debate. And then finally, we need a whole-of-government and a whole-of-society approach. We will not get anywhere by scapegoating the officials at the local government level,” Field said.
Dr Johandri Wright, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of the Western Cape’s Dullah Omar Institute, highlighted the relationship between poor record-keeping and weak municipal performance.
“Municipalities where we couldn’t find tariff structures, where we couldn’t find a by-law, where we couldn’t find even an IDP (Integrated Development Plan) or foundational information—you could see that they had poor performance. They were the ones that didn’t comply with the Blue Drop Reports, etc. You can even see it in their audit outcomes,” Wright said.
She said missing or inconsistent statistics could also point to misreporting and other forms of mismanagement.
Wright added that data and records were often maintained in isolation, with institutions not necessarily sharing information.
“Once we start sharing information and building bridges over these data and records, we might be able to pinpoint problems at an earlier stage before it is such a huge problem,” she said.
Falling maintenance spending raises concerns
Dr Albert Edgar Manyuchi, a senior researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand’s Mandela Institute in the School of Law, said reliable and complete statistics were essential for planning and allocating resources.
However, he said severe data gaps continued to hamper those processes.
“The maintenance spending rate shows reduced expenditure on maintenance over time for most municipalities. This is happening against a backdrop of increased recorded evidence of ageing infrastructure across most of the municipalities. And this issue should be of great concern to policymakers and even the residents in these various municipalities,” Manyuchi said.
Tracker complements existing water assessments
Water Research Commission research manager John Dini said the WRT would complement existing monitoring tools, including Green and Blue Drop reports, municipal assessments, Treasury monitoring and new Water Services Act standards.
Each of these tools uses its own metrics, he said.
Dini said the current situation presented an opportunity to address broader problems in local government rather than treating water services as an isolated challenge.
“The reason I think it’s so important is that there’s a window that’s open now. A window of opportunity where we finally hit the bottom as far as acknowledging that the problem is with the local government model, where we can’t just fix water services in isolation from fixing local governments,” Dini said.