Why South Africa’s Water Interventions Struggle After the Handback

South Africa’s Portfolio Committee on Water and Sanitation has identified the central weakness in national intervention under Section 63 of the Water Services Act: projects can progress while an external implementing agent is present, but the underlying municipal ability to operate and maintain the service may remain unchanged.

That distinction explains why an intervention can be visibly productive and still fail to become durable.

What does Section 63 allow?

The Water Services Act gives the national minister a route to intervene where a water-services authority has not effectively performed a function. In practice, the Department of Water and Sanitation can appoint an implementing agent, often a water board, to undertake specified work.

The mechanism is designed to restore performance, not permanently replace local government. The eventual destination is therefore a handback: assets and operating responsibility return to the municipality.

What did Parliament find?

After reviewing Section 63 interventions, the Portfolio Committee said progress was being made on projects but warned that sustainable results were unlikely if the original municipal problems persisted. It specifically pointed to shortages of the skills and capacity required for operation and maintenance after projects are transferred back.

This is not a complaint that nothing was built. It is a warning that capital delivery and service capability are different outputs.

Why can infrastructure improvement fail to improve the service permanently?

A treatment works, pump station or pipeline does not operate independently of the institution around it. It needs preventive maintenance, trained operators, energy and chemical budgets, procurement, asset records, billing and revenue collection, customer response, laboratory control and accountable management.

An implementing agent may temporarily supply several of those functions. It can procure contractors, mobilise technical expertise and unblock work. But if the municipal system that receives the asset still cannot retain engineers, collect sufficient revenue, purchase spares or enforce operating discipline, the intervention has repaired infrastructure without repairing the conditions that caused deterioration.

The uThukela intervention illustrates the breadth of the problem. When the national department invoked Section 63 there, it cited ageing infrastructure, high non-revenue water from bursts and leaks, inadequate wastewater maintenance and sewage discharges. Those are engineering symptoms, but their recurrence depends on institutional routines and resources.

Is the handback itself the weak point?

It is better understood as a test point. The weakness accumulates earlier if the intervention is planned as a portfolio of projects rather than a transition in operating capability.

A credible handback requires evidence that the receiving institution can perform the service: funded maintenance plans; filled critical posts; asset and spares registers; standard operating procedures; water-quality controls; procurement lead times; revenue arrangements; and management authority to act on failures. These conditions need to be built during the intervention, not assessed only when construction ends.

The implementing agent also needs an exit path that changes as municipal capability changes. A fixed end date can create pressure to transfer responsibility even if essential functions remain fragile. An open-ended intervention, however, risks normalising substitution and weakening local accountability. The practical answer is staged transfer against explicit service capabilities.

Would a longer national intervention solve the problem?

Not necessarily. More time helps only if it is used to transfer capability. An external body that continues to perform the work may stabilise the service while leaving the municipality dependent.

This is why South Africa’s 2025 Water and Sanitation Indaba called for review of the intervention and support model across constitutional and statutory mechanisms, including Sections 154, 139 and 63. The resolutions also pointed toward licensing water-service providers, clearer institutional roles and stronger water-board capacity. The Department’s Blue Drop reporting has similarly connected operating licences with separation of authority and provider functions and with broader intervention powers, including billing, revenue, supply-chain and human-resource functions.

Those proposals recognise that water failure rarely belongs to one technical department. Revenue, procurement and staffing can determine whether a repaired asset works.

What should a stronger intervention measure?

Project completion is necessary but insufficient. A stronger public scorecard would separate four results:

1. Asset recovery: whether specified infrastructure has been repaired, refurbished or commissioned.
2. Service recovery: whether water quality, continuity, pressure, wastewater compliance and response times have improved.
3. Institutional recovery: whether the municipality can staff, fund, procure for and manage those services.
4. Post-transfer durability: whether performance persists after functions return.

The fourth measure is the one most likely to reveal whether an intervention succeeded on its own terms.

What is Parliament’s warning really asking government to change?

It asks government to treat intervention as institutional reconstruction, not emergency contracting. The national department, water boards, provinces and municipalities must agree not only on the work to be delivered but on the operating organisation that will remain.

Section 63 can create a period in which failing services are stabilised and neglected assets recovered. It cannot, by itself, make a municipality capable. If that capacity is not deliberately produced, handback simply reconnects improved infrastructure to the same failure mechanism.