South Africa’s water crisis does not begin when the tap runs dry. By then, the crisis has already travelled through years of neglected maintenance, weak municipal management, leaking pipes, hollowed-out technical departments and procurement systems that reward emergency spending more generously than prevention.

We are a water-scarce country. That fact is neither new nor negotiable. South Africa receives less than 500 millimetres of rain a year, well below the global average. Rainfall is uneven, evaporation is high and climate change is making droughts, floods and seasonal patterns more difficult to predict.

But nature has become a convenient alibi for political and administrative failure.

A country with so little water cannot afford to lose so much of it. Department of Water and Sanitation data places national water losses at approximately 41.7 per cent, while non-revenue water stands at 46.4 per cent. Nearly half the treated water entering municipal systems produces no revenue because it leaks from broken infrastructure, passes through faulty meters, is taken through illegal connections or disappears into dysfunctional billing systems.

This creates a vicious cycle. Municipalities lose the water. They then lose the revenue that should have maintained the pipes. Infrastructure deteriorates further, losses increase and residents are told there is no money to repair the system.

The crisis is therefore not only hydrological. It is institutional.

The Blue Drop and No Drop assessments reveal a system weakened by more than old pipes. Many water authorities lack competent process controllers, engineers, maintenance teams, reliable monitoring and credible corrective plans. A reservoir may be full while the community below it remains dry because a pump has failed, electricity has been interrupted or municipal storage is inadequate.

Scarcity, in this context, is partly manufactured by incapacity.

The most disturbing expression of this failure is the growth of an economy around water tankers. Tankers are indispensable during genuine emergencies. A burst main, drought or natural disaster requires immediate relief. But an emergency measure becomes dangerous when it develops into a permanent commercial model.

Once private operators earn money each day that a municipal network remains broken, failure acquires beneficiaries. Repairing the pipe threatens somebody’s income.

Government has publicly acknowledged allegations of criminal syndicates sabotaging pumps, pipelines and valves to sustain demand for private tanker services. The Special Investigating Unit is probing multiple tanker-related matters, while its Alfred Nzo investigation uncovered the payment of R75 million for trucks and tankers without budget approval.

These facts do not prove that every tanker operator belongs to a cartel, nor that every infrastructure failure is deliberate sabotage. Loose accusations can conceal more than they reveal. What they establish is that opaque emergency procurement, weak oversight and prolonged infrastructure failure have created ideal conditions for organised profiteering.

The answer cannot be another committee assembled after the taps have run dry.

Every municipal tanker contract should be publicly accessible. Residents must know who owns the contracted company, how much it is paid, where the water is collected, whether that water has been tested, which communities must receive it and when permanent supply will be restored. Tanker expenditure should trigger an automatic technical plan with deadlines for repairing the failed network.

South Africa must also invest beyond dams. It needs aggressive pipe replacement, pressure management, leak detection, wastewater reuse, responsible groundwater development, rainwater harvesting and professionally managed treatment works. Partnerships with private capital may help finance and operate some projects, but they cannot become another route through which public accountability is privatised.

World Water Week’s 2026 theme is “Water for People and Progress”. For South Africa, the order matters. There can be no progress while people queue beside roads for a resource that the Constitution recognises as a right.

We are not simply running out of water. We are leaking it, mismanaging it and, in some places, allowing people to profit from its absence. The future will depend on whether we repair the pipes before the politics around them hardens into a permanent economy of thirst.