Survey shows South Africans do not trust municipal water

A new survey has shown that a large number of South Africans don’t trust the quality of the water they drink.

According to the survey by Watercan, an initiative of lobby group the Organisation Undoing Tax Abuse (Outa), only 37% of locals “routinely” trusted the quality of their drinking water.

Watercan received 1,291 responses to the survey, with most from Gauteng and the Western Cape and the least number of responses from the Northern Cape. Based on the results, more than 45% of respondents don’t trust the quality of the water they drink.

Many respondents felt the poor state of water was due to inefficient municipalities, dysfunctional wastewater treatment plants and poor infrastructure.

The government’s recentlypublished Blue Drop 2022 report showed that water quality in the country continues to decline, with 23% of municipalities flagged as being at critical risk.

Access to sufficient, safe water is a basic right highlighted in the constitution, with municipalities tasked with the provision of water services while provincial and national government is required to provide oversight to ensure that quality and access is not compromised.

Yet many of SA’S 257 municipalities — the coal face of service delivery — are facing acute management and financial problems, leading to a failure to provide services and meet debt obligations.

Municipal audit outcomes, a measure of financial governance, routinely paint a bleak picture of the state of municipalities.

Millions of rand for electricity, water and sewerage services and other infrastructure projects are mismanaged and disappear each month, at the expense of businesses and job-creation efforts. In 2021, food and beverages group Clover SA announced it was closing the country’s biggest cheese factory and moving it from Lichtenburg to Kwazulu-natal because of poor roads, water shortages and constant power outages.

A provincial breakdown of the Watercan survey indicates that 90% of respondents from the Eastern Cape do not trust their drinking water — with the authors of the report pointing out that this is not a surprise given the approaching Day Zero in Nelson Mandela Bay metro and surrounding towns.

In the Free State 81% of respondents raised reservations about their drinking water, followed by Mpumalanga (79%), Limpopo (74%) and North West (74%). The two provinces that had somewhat positive comments are Gauteng and the Western Cape. In Gauteng, 59% of respondents said they did not trust their drinking water, while the 43% in the Western Cape raised similar concerns.

The majority of the respondents who were happy with their water were in Johannesburg or Cape Town, with specific mention of the reliability of the services of Rand Water bulk water utility, which supplies a number of municipalities, and the City of Cape Town.