Why water agency is needed
PRIORITY: ENSURE HIGH LEVEL OF SECURITY, RELIABLE SUPPLY, NEW INFRASTRUCTURE
New body ensures large users like councils, industry continue to fund major systems.
In his State of the Nation Address (Sona) last week, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced that the establishment of a National Water Resources Infrastructure Agency would be accelerated.
It has been many years in the making.
The agency will place, under a single management, the development and operation of the systems that are crucial for the country’s water resource security. As well as building new water resource infrastructure, it will operate the existing dams and main transmission canals and pipelines that are currently run by the department of water and sanitation.
The agency will also develop and operate specialist infrastructure like that which treats acid mine drainage. These functions are presently divided between the department and the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority.
The unified agency will ensure that large water users such as metro municipalities, public utilities and big companies continue to fund the construction and operation of the major water systems on which they depend. Raising money from loans releases more of government’s budget funds to address social needs.
The new arrangement will also ensure that funds are properly applied. This will avert the kind of problems that resulted when billions of rands meant for operation, maintenance and loan repayments were irregularly diverted by a previous minister of water and sanitation for a spurious “war on leaks” project that allegedly never fixed a single leak.
As important, the agency will allow the systems to be run efficiently. The government’s procurement and personnel processes are not designed to support specialised technical activities.
The agency will be able to streamline procurement and recruitment using the processes already proven by the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority.
Water infrastructure takes many years to plan and build and needs to be structured as a multiyear operation. But the planning and expenditure of government departments is still controlled through annual budgets.
These do not support a multiyear planning or allow loans to be raised to fund commercially viable projects.
A new approach was introduced when the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority was set up in 1986 to help implement the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, a partnership between Lesotho and South Africa.
Apart from building the outfall tunnels on the SA side, the authority raised loans to fund construction in Lesotho and is paying them back using charges paid to the water and sanitation department by bulk water users.
In the past 20 years, the authority has completed other important projects. These include:
The dams and transfer infrastructure to supply Cape Town;
The Ethekweni/Msunduzi corridor; and
Power stations and Sasol’s refineries in Mpumalanga.
All these projects were financed by billions of rands worth of loans raised by the authority.
While the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority has proved to be an efficient project implementer, it depends on the department to collect the revenues from users.
The weaknesses of this arrangement became obvious when the funds collected were used by the department for other purposes. This not only left the authority short of cash to repay its loans, it also starved department’s operations. This contributed to a serious maintenance backlog.
Tensions also rose when then minister Nomvula Mokonyane instructed the authority to build projects without any provision to fund them. There were also long delays in other critical projects while Mokonyane sought to determine who would implement them.
Those incidents highlighted the need to bring the development of major water infrastructure under unified, focused and more disciplined and accountable management.
While the agency will help to ensure reliable bulk water supplies, it will not fix all failures at local government level. Aside from generalised bad management, dry household taps are not usually the result of a shortage of “raw water” in rivers. They are the failure of municipalities to do the right thing at the right time to ensure supplies.
After years of unhappy experiences with public organisations that fail to achieve their goals, why is government proposing to establish a new one – the National Water Resources Infrastructure Agency?
Public institutions are needed to meet public goals where there is no obvious alternative. It is a national priority to ensure high level water security – adequate supplies, reliably and predictably available – for big users such as municipalities and industries which support the population.
– Muller is visiting adjunct professor, School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand.
– The Conversation
Agency will be able to streamline procurement using processes proven by the Trans Caledon Tunnel Authority.