Water Crisis’ Speech Was Vague and Inaccurate

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

The Democratic Alliance sees President Cyril Ramaphosa’s address to the extended President’s Coordinating Council on South Africa’s deepening water crisis, as one without an actual plan to address the water crisis.

The President correctly identified many of the causes of the crisis: weak municipal capacity, poor maintenance, illegal connections, inadequate monitoring, institutional instability, and the collapse of basic water and sanitation infrastructure. But South Africans did not need another diagnosis. They need the actual Water Crisis Plan.

The President first announced the “National Water Crisis Committee” to deliver a “Water Crisis Plan” during his SONA in February 2026, and committed government to a coordinated response to the crisis. Today, he again referred to a National Water Action Plan, but there is still no clear public version of the plan for South Africans to scrutinise.

That is not good enough.

A speech is not a plan. A meeting is not implementation. And another promise will not put water back into people’s taps.

The President himself confirmed that water interruptions are worsening and that the eight metros lose an average of 34% of the water they purchase before it can be billed, with some metros “approaching 50%,” in the President’s own words.

But the President is understating the true scale of the crisis. According to the Department of Water and Sanitation’s own Dashboard of March 2026, eThekwini’s February non-revenue water was 57.6%, with a 12-month average of 55.9%.

So eThekwini is notably over a 50% water loss.

This raises a serious question: is the President receiving accurate and up-to-date information from the Department and municipalities, or is the scale of the crisis being softened before it reaches the Presidency?

These failures are not theoretical. In Gauteng, residents continue to face unstable supply, repeated outages, delayed infrastructure projects and poor communication. The unveiling of the long-delayed Brixton reservoir and tower this week is a reminder of how badly Johannesburg and Gauteng have bungled critical water infrastructure.

The DA welcomes the President’s focus on ring-fencing water revenue, rebuilding technical capacity, reducing water losses, and enforcing accountability. These are reforms we have long called for. But the test is no longer whether government can say the right things. The test is whether it can deliver.

For something to be called a “Water Crisis Plan” it must be a plan. It must include clear timelines, funding mechanisms, measurable targets, and consequences for failure.

It must require municipalities to fix their infrastructure, spend water and sanitation grants properly, reduce non-revenue water, protect infrastructure budgets, and face consequences when they fail. Those consequences must be clear, and certain.

Municipalities that cannot spend grant funding on critical water infrastructure should forfeit that money or have it redirected to capable implementing agents.

South Africans have had enough of hot air, delayed delivery and watered-down assessments of the crisis.

President Ramaphosa must release the full Water Crisis Plan now as committed in his State of the Nation Address. South Africans need water in their taps, not another speech about why the taps are dry.