We have held another Water Summit this year with the same narrative being put on the recurring water security agenda with one major difference in that the lack of accountability and sector wide reforms were not visible and required.We also had record rains in the summer rainfall regions with most major dams overflowing at the end of the summer season giving us a good water reserve outlook and the gazetting of the Revised Compulsory National Water & Sanitation Services Standards with Regulation 3630 requiring all water and waste-water facilities to be overseen by a classified operator/s be compliant by the 30 June 2025, big question is do all facilities now comply? We are also seeing that the Water Services Act is being modified to enforce the licencing of Water Services Providers so that licences can be revoked for non-compliances. All of these legislative changes bode well for moving towards improved and compliant water services where the private sector will be called upon to assist in compliance at many levels but will require the elusive enforcement and accountability pillars to be effective, this is where our efforts need to be from now until all in place to start the reboot.

On a local and very topical level, the Emfuleni Municipality in Gauteng, with another thirty eight reported by Treasury, whose water and sanitation services have collapsed over the past decade recently announced the formation of an SPV with Rand Water, also the majority shareholder. This has been seen as the only option left after many failed interventions by national and provincial government, the SANDF and ERWAT. This will force the ring fencing of water related revenues directly into the SPV ensuring that water related costs can be met with the concomitant revenue. The SPV will also be governed by the Companies Act which will improve overall governance, accountability and enhance the ability to attract funding into much needed dilapidated infrastructure. This will probably be a model for many of the struggling cities and towns supplied by water boards and will open the door to private sector participation as the skills simply do not exist in sufficient quantities in the public sector until rebuilt over the next decades, luckily this is not debated any longer and accepted as fact by all stakeholders. South Africa just requires enforcement of its policies and legislation across the board and the requisite accountability will be inculcated.

With this background and a restated R7 trillion bill to achieve water security in SA by 20250, supposedly synchronised with the National Infrastructure Plan 20250 key policy, or R256 billion per annum, how do we overcome the current collapse of water services outside the Western Cape?

Step 1: The much-vaunted IWR, Independent Water Regulator, lobbied by private sector NPO’s since 2017, that would report to parliament with direct oversight is the only viablemechanism left to address the accountability and enforcementphilosophies so elusive in SA outside the Western Cape. This IWR would need to at leastcover:

• Water Use and Service Provision Licences at all levels.
• Water pricing at all levels to ensure zero based costings per catchment area and distribution system.
• Water quality enforcement.
• NEMA compliance.
• Regulation of PSP and PPP programs.

The failures of the British and Welsh regulators have the outcome that all of these functions must be harmonised in a single regulator that SA needs to copy with all the lessons learnt. The decentralisation of many of the routine regulatory duties can be devolved to the six CMA’s, Catchment Management Agencies, using one governance framework adapted to localised realities.

Step 2: Embark on the massive institutional capacity building of the sector at all three tiers of government to create the required base to embark on the Water & Sanitation Master Plan of 2018.The Regulation 3630 s the infrastructure operational capacities and skills required, we also need similar regulations for the balance of the skills deployed in the water value chain.

Step 3: Treasury has been forced to stop grant payments to 39 defaulting municipalities; this could result in a systemic collapse of local government and of course impact the national GDP generation and harm the required investments in municipal water infrastructure. The entire grant systems requirere-engineering so that it is ring fenced to fund its intended purposes and not used for cross subsidisation of salaries and other non-essential, unaffordableandunintended services. Essential services like water need to be ring-fenced so that the inputs to the service delivery are all paid for, from the bulk abstraction, purification, transmission to the delivery to the customer meter.

Step 4: Ring-fencing of municipal revenues to attract PSP’s, Private Sector Participation, who require guarantees to ensure that their investments can be regularly serviced over many years as the quantum of investment required can only be recouped over at least twenty to thirty years. These assets generally have a fifty plus design life making it very bankable.

We have plenty to do in the water sector in South Africa with accommodating policies and legislation, now its our collective responsibility to enact the change and get going with aplomb.

Benoît is the Operations Director and a shareholder of Nexus Water Alchemy and a founding director and CEO of Water Ledger SA that now has a global parent to share and implement in the latest digitalisation solutions primarily in the water arena. Water ledger is based in Ireland where he is also a founding director in a team that is the first to tokenise water trades and accounting globally in the distributed ledger approach with groundbreaking success.Current activities are focusing on the revitalisation of the South African water sector with a lead role in the SA Water Chamber as co-founder and CEO where these initiatives seek to engender water resilience and attract investment back into South Africa by aligning public and private stakeholder expectations. Benoît contributes regularly to various publications and the media locally and globally in the water sector whilst enjoying regular keynote speeches and panel activities.