President Ramaphosa’s National Water Action Plan is a serious attempt at a problem that has been getting worse for a decade. I don’t say that to score a point off it. Government’s own numbers back up why it exists: 32% of treated water leaks away nationally before it reaches anyone, non-revenue water sits at 47.4%, and the Auditor-General found R14.89 billion in treated water lost in a single financial year. Those are not activist numbers. They’re the state’s own audit findings, and they describe a system built to react to failure, not prevent it.
Brits is the clearest recent example of what that looks like in practice. Earlier this month, a routine 72-hour maintenance shutdown at the town’s water treatment works ran four days over. That plant has had R845 million spent on it since 2010, and it has missed its completion deadline three times: 2023, 2025, and again in March this year. Nobody in Brits was surprised by the delay. That’s not a criticism of the people doing the work. It’s evidence that even a well-funded infrastructure project, once something fails, is fixing a crisis rather than preventing one.
I’m not writing this to criticise the plan. I’m writing it because I’ve spent nineteen years building water storage for the businesses and communities that couldn’t wait for a fix to arrive, and needed something preventative in the meantime.
We started Damsak in 2007 because rigid tanks ran out at around 20,000 litres and needed a permanent concrete base. Everyone we’ve sold to since has been someone whose water supply failed before help arrived: a mine needing dust suppression on a site that moves, a food processor covering a supply interruption, a farmer getting through a dry season a dam couldn’t manage. None of them were waiting on government to fail. They were choosing prevention over hoping the gap between an announcement and an outcome wouldn’t reach them.
“A business or community that invests in its own water independence isn’t giving up on the system. It’s buying that system time to fix itself.”
That’s the argument I’d make to whoever is shaping how the NWAP gets implemented: recognise decentralised water storage formally, as a preventative layer within the national water security strategy, not an emergency response once supply has already failed, but protection put in place before it does. A business or community that invests in its own water independence isn’t giving up on the system. It’s buying that system time to fix itself, without its own operations grinding to a halt while it waits.
The alternative is what Brits is living through right now: reactive spending after the fact, years into a project, with no preventative measure in place for the people and businesses depending on it in the meantime. Municipalities can’t move faster than their budgets and capacity allow, and I don’t think blaming them further gets anyone water. But there’s no reason storage that already exists, already deployed across agriculture, mining, hospitality, and manufacturing in this country, has to sit outside the national conversation about how we get through the next five to ten years.
The NWAP is the right long-term answer. Prevention is what has to hold the line until it arrives.