State must employ technical experts to tackle crisis in rural water supply

Funds have been allocated to tackle the problem but municipalities lack the right people for the job

Last year was a bad one for the water sector. The suffering of farmers was well publicised and urban dwellers spoke endlessly on talk radio shows of how they struggled with water restrictions and wilting gardens. But where was the voice of rural people, many of whom get no water at all? It is not that we don’t know how serious the situation is. Using the 2011 census, the Department of Water and Sanitation showed that in Limpopo, for example, of the 60% of households that have been provided with water schemes, only 3% get water with no interruptions — 80% have interruptions of longer than two days at a time.

Responding to the 2016 community survey carried out by Statistics SA, about 44% of households in Limpopo indicated that they lacked a safe and reliable water supply. This was far higher than all their other service provision concerns. The situation was not much better in the Eastern Cape and other more rural provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and North West.

What is the government doing about this? The problem does not lie with finance: large amounts of capital have been allocated to rural water supply projects through a range of grants.

No informed observer will disagree that the problem lies with the capacity of the municipalities tasked with providing water — and sanitation services — to rural communities.

The greatest part of the rural areas of the former homelands, where the lack of water supply service is by far the most severe, is served by 21 district municipalities. On average, these district municipalities each serve 720,000 people. Yet an analysis undertaken for the Department of Co-operative Governance and Traditional Affairs in 2014 showed that several of these district municipalities did not employ a single professional engineer. On average, one professional engineer was responsible for R22bn in infrastructure assets, compared with R1.6bn in metropolitan areas.

It is easy to place the responsibility for this state of affairs on these district municipalities. But the reality is that they are heavily reliant on support from the provincial and national government — and this is where the real problem lies. This support — at least from the point of view of infrastructure management — is seriously lacking. This is partly because the national and provincial departments themselves do not have the technical capability, with far too few professional engineers employed and, it is partly because no properly designed intervention has been put in place to bring in the necessary technical expertise.

The department did take one bold step in 2011 with the establishment of the Municipal Infrastructure Support Agent (Misa) as a government component within the department. The purpose of Misa was to build the technical capacity of disadvantaged municipalities. This was a most important intervention as national government departments themselves lacked technical expertise. The Department of Water and Sanitation, which had historically provided some of this expertise, started to withdraw from directly supporting municipalities and, in any event, was losing engineers.

However, Misa itself was not staffed at senior level by professional engineers and by 2014, when Pravin Gordhan became co-operative governance minister, it was evident Misa was not performing the task it was set up to do. Gordhan intervened and brought in Sean Phillips, one of the most senior civil engineers in the national government, to head up Misa. After this, Misa recognised the importance of setting up partnerships with the private sector to assist district municipalities in improving their technical capacity.

With the assistance of consultants and advice from the World Bank, Misa established a support programme for rural municipalities based on regional management support contracts to be set up as partners with district municipalities to manage rural water supply and sanitation infrastructure. The Treasury agreed to fund this programme and it was launched at a workshop in January 2016.

Things then fell apart. With Gordhan’s departure to the Treasury, the leadership of Misa changed and Phillips left. Misa reverted to an organisation without the necessary professional engineering expertise within its top management structure.

The shortcomings of Misa with regard to procurement also became evident: although tenders were called for regional management support contracts to be set up in the Eastern Cape, the contracts were not awarded and the tenders were cancelled in late 2016.

Misa’s ties with the World Bank, which could have helped to bring in international expertise, was not maintained. The opportunity to make a significant difference to the technical capacity in the neediest municipalities was lost.

Now 2016 has passed and rural municipalities continue to struggle with a serious lack of technical expertise. Rural water supply schemes, many of them costing billions of rand, continue to decline. How is it possible in a country such as ours, where we have the financial resources to provide proper water to all our citizens, that this can happen?

The blame cannot lie solely with local government. The experiences described above point to a lack of leadership and technical capacity in national government departments and their agents tasked with providing municipal services. This occurs in the overall context of a public sector where engineers are not valued and major national infrastructure programmes are implemented without the necessary technical expertise to keep them functioning properly and sustainably.