- Billions in treated water are lost annually through leakage, weak governance and poor maintenance, shrinking already limited fiscal space and undermining service delivery.
- Massive new infrastructure commitments risk compounding waste if non-revenue water and financial accountability are not decisively addressed at the municipal level.
- In the world’s most unequal country, water inefficiency becomes a distributive injustice that deepens poverty and entrenches structural inequality.
In his 2026 State of the Nation Address, President Cyril Ramaphosa reminded South Africans that the Constitution commits the state to progressively realise the rights to housing, healthcare, food, water, education and social security.
He was correct to foreground water as one of the most urgent issues facing communities from Johannesburg to Knysna to Giyani. The visible crisis of dry taps and erratic supply has become a daily reality for millions. Yet beyond the operational failures lies a fiscal dimension that demands equal and urgent scrutiny.
South Africa is not only water-scarce. It is resource constrained, fiscally pressured and structurally unequal. In what remains the most unequal country in the world, every billion rand carries opportunity cost. According to the National Treasury’s latest assessment of metropolitan finances, water losses in the eight major metros amounted to R8.66 billion in the 2023 24 financial year alone. The average loss rate is approximately 35 percent.
In eThekwini, it exceeds 50 percent, while Johannesburg loses more than 40 percent of treated water before it reaches consumers. This is not abstract data. It represents water that was pumped, treated, purified and paid for, only to leak into the ground through ageing pipes, bursts, illegal connections and weak monitoring systems, often compounded by corruption, poor governance and maladministration.
In a country battling to fund social grants sustainably, expand healthcare capacity, improve public schooling, build houses and repair clinics, R8.66 billion lost in a single year cannot be dismissed as a technical inefficiency. It raises a moral question about the stewardship of scarce public resources.
More money into a leaking system
In the 2025 State of the Nation Address, the President announced that the Infrastructure Fund had secured R23 billion for seven large water infrastructure projects. In this year’s address, he committed more than R156 billion over the next three years to water and sanitation infrastructure, alongside a R54 billion incentive aimed at encouraging metros to reform water, sanitation and electricity services.
The creation of a National Water Crisis Committee and the planned National Water Resource Infrastructure Agency signal political recognition of the scale of the challenge. Legal reforms to withdraw licences from failing providers and criminal charges against 56 municipalities further demonstrate an intent to enforce accountability.
The difficulty, however, lies in sequencing and system integrity. When billions are injected into municipal environments that already lose a third or, in some cases, half of the water that flows through them, the risk is that new infrastructure simply feeds existing inefficiencies.
If non revenue water is not decisively reduced, expanded supply may translate into expanded leakage. The President himself acknowledged that poor planning and inadequate maintenance are primary causes of dry taps, and that water revenue is frequently diverted to other municipal purposes instead of being reinvested in maintenance. If that diagnosis is accurate, then the central challenge is not funding alone but financial governance.
The opportunity cost of leakage
In a deeply unequal society, inefficiency is never neutral. When billions are lost through preventable system failures, the burden is redistributed across society. It manifests in higher tariffs once households exceed the free basic allocation. It appears in deferred maintenance, particularly in indigent communities that may endure extended periods without a reliable supply. It also surfaces in reduced spending in other sectors, as funds are redirected to address recurring water crises rather than long-term development priorities.
The Constitution does not guarantee water in isolation. It enshrines housing, healthcare, education and social security alongside it. When water systems haemorrhage funds through avoidable inefficiencies, these rights begin to compete for shrinking fiscal space. Leakage, therefore, represents more than technical failure. It constitutes distributive injustice in a context where growth is slow, debt levels are elevated, and social needs remain vast. Diverting scarce public funds to compensate for preventable losses intensifies inequality rather than alleviating it.
Building new dams while old pipes fail
The President has indicated that longstanding holdups affecting major projects such as Phase Two of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project and the uMkhomazi Dam have been resolved. Preparatory work is advancing on the Ntabelanga Dam on the uMzimvubu River to expand supply for household use and irrigation in the Eastern Cape. The proposed National Water Resource Infrastructure Agency is intended to strengthen coordination and attract greater investment into bulk infrastructure.
Large-scale supply projects are undeniably important for long-term water security. However, the President also conceded that the core challenge lies not in the availability of water but in getting water to people’s taps. This admission underscores a critical governance dilemma. Bulk expansion without distribution reform risks misalignment.
It may be politically compelling to launch new dam projects, yet the less visible task of replacing ageing pipes, upgrading reticulation networks and strengthening maintenance regimes often yields more immediate efficiency gains. South Africa’s crisis is therefore not primarily a deficit of dams but a deficit of governance, administration and technical capacity at the local level.
Accountability must precede expansion
The Auditor General has repeatedly characterised local government by weak accountability, poor financial management, service delivery failures and institutional instability. The President has acknowledged that in some municipalities, patronage networks undermine technical competence. While criminal charges against municipal officials may signal seriousness, prosecution operates retrospectively. Fiscal losses occur in real time.
If water revenue is to be ring-fenced, that ring-fencing must be transparent, measurable and subject to public audit. Municipal dashboards should publish non-revenue water levels on a monthly basis. Maintenance expenditure must be disclosed and benchmarked. Pipe replacement targets require clear timelines and performance monitoring. Without these governance safeguards, R156 billion risks becoming an injection into a structurally porous system, with limited long-term corrective impact.
The inequality multiplier
Water outages are no longer confined to historically marginalised communities. Interruptions in supply now affect middle-class suburbs, which have heightened national visibility and political urgency. Yet the capacity to absorb disruption remains uneven. Wealthier households can install boreholes, water tanks and filtration systems. They can manage tariff increases and invest in private resilience. Poor households cannot. They depend entirely on municipal systems that are increasingly strained.
When municipalities lose billions through leakage, fiscal responses often include tariff adjustments or increased reliance on national transfers. Both ultimately burden ordinary citizens, either directly through higher costs or indirectly through constrained social spending elsewhere. In the most unequal country in the world, inefficiency functions as a multiplier of injustice. It compounds vulnerability and entrenches structural divides.
Fix the leaks before pumping the billions
There is no simple solution to a crisis rooted in years of systemic underinvestment and institutional decay. However, sequencing matters. Stabilising distribution networks before expanding bulk supply would yield immediate efficiency dividends. Securing financial governance before mobilising additional billions would strengthen fiscal sustainability. Repairing and maintaining existing infrastructure before embarking on ambitious expansion would reduce the scale of avoidable loss.
Reducing non-revenue water by even 10 percentage points could recover billions annually, resources that could be reinvested in maintenance and service delivery without diverting funds from other constitutional priorities. In a state striving to realise multiple rights simultaneously under severe fiscal constraint, allowing billions to leak into the ground is neither economically prudent nor socially just.
Water justice is therefore not only about litres delivered. It is about fiscal discipline, governance integrity, and the kind of developmental state South Africa chooses to build.
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