Municipalities Can Defy Water Action Plan With No Consequences

Statement by Stephen Moore MP – DA Spokesperson on Water and Sanitation:

An incredibly difficult summer with wildly unpredictable weather has approached, and in more communities, water has become unsafe; yet the Presidency has revealed that it cannot and will not enforce its Water Action Plan.

ANC municipalities can defy the Presidency on critical actions like ringfencing, as they are already doing and get away with it.

The President’s Water Action Plan and Crisis Committee also lack a dedicated budget and instead rely on the very same programmes that have failed to end dry taps. The Minister of Water & Sanitation has also confirmed that no budget has been allocated to the President’s Water Action Plan or the Committee meant to enforce it.

This begs the question of why the Water Action Plan and the President’s Water Crisis Committee actually exist, if it is nothing more than words on paper, with no execution.

The Presidency has further underscored that only DA-run City of Cape Town has implemented necessary water-saving policies, with the lowest water losses of any metro in the country. At a time when ANC-led municipalities are resisting efforts to fix their water systems and are a decade away at least from fixing them, Cape Town is already there. Cape Town shows that our water crisis can be fixed, with the necessary political will. Why not the rest of South Africa? Suffering must not be normalised.

South Africans cannot afford another summer of promises, committees and recycled plans while taps run dry. ANC-run municipalities ignoring the President tells us exactly what they think of voters. They do not care about South Africans suffering from deprived rights. South Africans, in kind, should not care about employing the ANC come November 4.

Vote DA for safe water in taps, not toothless plans.