Q&A with water & sanitation DG Sean Phillips on the launch of the national water action plan

We’ve had a plethora of water action plans over the years, so why is the water crisis getting worse?

Because of the challenges in municipalities as pointed out in the national water action plan. A similar thing happened with the electricity crisis.

How will this plan address the capacity crisis in municipalities?

To tackle the load-shedding crisis, the president established the electricity crisis committee, and they developed an action plan to address the electricity crisis by bringing together all the different departments under the president’s leadership.

Why hasn’t this been done for the water crisis?

That’s exactly what this is. Now there’s a national water action plan using a similar methodology. There’s a national water crisis committee chaired by the president.

Why was the electricity crisis sorted, while with each new water plan the crisis has got worse?

The previous water action plans and the master plan were done by the department of water & sanitation. This one brings together all the different departments. There are things that need to be done that are beyond our scope as the DWS, such as considering the possibility of constitutional change and changes to legislation.

Many things could have been implemented under existing legislation for years, couldn’t they?

There’ve been challenges in implementing legal mechanisms to intervene in municipalities that are failing to deliver water services. To improve the effectiveness of an intervention, it might be necessary to change some of the legislation relating to local government.

How will the water action plan force municipalities to ring-fence their water revenue?

It does a number of things simultaneously. The National Treasury is implementing a programme starting with the metros to incentivise municipalities to ring-fence revenue from the sale of water.

So why have we just seen the City of Johannesburg take R3.4bn out of Joburg Water’s account, leaving it with a zero balance?

This is one of a number of things which will result in this being stopped.

This is what your minister promised three years ago.

The programme is in its early days. There are processes that need to be gone through to get a city like Joburg to fully ring-fence revenue from the sale of water.

How many action plans and legislative changes does it take to fix water leaks?

We have a constitution which says one sphere of government can’t interfere with the decision-making of another sphere of government. We can’t just issue an instruction to municipalities to do A, B and C. That’s why the Treasury is incentivising them to reform. We’ve introduced legislation in parliament to enable us to set standards for the capacity required by municipalities through the licensing of water service providers.

Meanwhile, there are 43 leaking reservoirs in Joburg alone.

You’ll see in the national water action plan that also the presidency is going to be leading a process of looking into the possibility of changing the constitution so water and sanitation services will be allocated to those municipalities which have the capacity to implement them. There are major reforms in the national water action plan, but changing the constitution will take time.