Before the next municipal election on 4 November 2026, South Africans will cast their votes knowing what the past five years have delivered: a Gauteng water crisis that left the country’s economic heartland without water for weeks, a Knysna reservoir approaching empty, and a Green Drop Report confirming that nearly half of our wastewater treatment systems are in a critical state. The question everyone is asking is reasonable. Will a new council actually change this, or will we be having the same conversation in 2031?
The South African Institution of Civil Engineering (SAICE) has spent significant time analysing the Draft White Paper on Local Government, where comments were submitted on 28 May 2026. Our view of the White Paper is that it correctly identifies what is broken, and with the right implementation architecture, it has the potential to become the document that finally changes things on the ground, says Ms Sekadi Phayane-Shakhane, Chief Executive Officer at SAICE.[1]
Rethinking how constitutional mandates serve communities
One of the most important areas that the White Paper gets right is its diagnosis of constitutional autonomy as a structural barrier. Under the current framework, municipalities hold constitutional protection over infrastructure functions, including water, sanitation, and electricity distribution, regardless of whether they have the technical capacity to deliver them. The result is a system that protects the dysfunction, rather than the delivery of Constitutional rights to the residents.
Part of the answer is structural. South Africa’s current two-tier system, where district and local municipalities often hold overlapping powers in the same area, has frequently produced competition rather than co-operation. The result is bulk infrastructure, like treatment works, planned by one entity while the local pipe network that should connect to it is planned by another. The outcome is exactly what it sounds like: infrastructure that does not reach the people it was built for. SAICE supports the White Paper’s move towards a single-tier model with clearly assigned mandates, paired with a performance-linked system in which a municipality that cannot manage a function, such as water reticulation, does not retain it indefinitely.[2]
The Drop Reports, released on 31 March 2026, laid this bare in numbers showing what should concern every South African. Nationally, 47.3% of treated water is lost or unbilled before it reaches a tap, representing approximately R9.9 billion in losses every year. Our national water use is running 13% above available resources. Meanwhile, 47% of municipal wastewater treatment systems, 396 out of 848 assessed, are in a critical state, worsening from 39% in the 2021/22 assessment.[3]
These are not numbers from a single failed municipality. They reflect a systemic pattern. SAICE is clear that any reassignment of powers must carry a non-negotiable condition: technical capacity, registered engineering professionals, asset records, maintenance budgets and operational systems must follow the function. Transferring a mandate without transferring the means to deliver it simply moves the failure to a new address. This is also why SAICE supports the White Paper’s position that professional registration with bodies such as the Engineering Council of South Africa (ECSA) should be a non-negotiable prerequisite for appointment into senior technical leadership roles overseeing infrastructure and water services. That single requirement moves the conversation from needing more people to needing accountable and qualified people.
The accountability gap that the White Paper has not yet closed
The White Paper proposes strengthening oversight and accountability structures, which SAICE welcomes. But it relies too heavily on Auditor-General (AG) outcomes as the trigger for consequence management. AG findings are retrospective. They arrive, in many cases, years after the infrastructure damage has already been done. Accountability must instead be linked to real-time infrastructure performance indicators, asset condition, maintenance backlogs, service interruptions, technical vacancy rates, and vested in an independent, technically competent oversight function rather than council structures exposed to the same political pressures that produced the failure in the first place.[4]
SAICE also recommends a mandatory project readiness certification: no infrastructure project should proceed to procurement until registered professionals have certified that it is technically sound and properly planned, including stakeholder alignment. This would meaningfully reduce the delays, disputes, and cost overruns that currently plague municipal infrastructure delivery.
SAICE supports extending the municipal manager term from five years to between seven and ten years. Infrastructure does not operate on electoral cycles. A water treatment works, for example, takes years to plan, fund, procure and build, and a manager whose term ends before the project does, has little incentive to prioritise it. But longer tenure without real-time, independent consequence management simply creates a longer window for entrenched failure. Both reforms must move together.
The human resources picture adds urgency. The municipal water sector currently carries a 28% vacancy rate, with 7,426 positions unfilled, many of them technical and engineering roles that directly affect the safety and reliability of the infrastructure communities depend on.[5]
Planning for the full lifecycle of infrastructure
“The construction of new infrastructure is only the beginning of its story. What determines long-term value is the commitment to maintain, refurbish, and eventually renew that asset over its full operational life. The White Paper must make lifecycle costing a mandatory planning requirement, or the infrastructure delivered today will become the emergency expenditure of tomorrow,” says Ms. Phayane-Shakhane.
Between 41% and 60% of municipal capital budgets should, by established standards, be directed towards asset renewal. In practice, operational funding pressures consume those budgets before maintenance is reached. The White Paper must make lifecycle costing a front-door requirement for every infrastructure project: no approval, no funding, no classification as bankable, without a full account of what the asset will cost to maintain, refurbish, and eventually replace. At present, lifecycle costing receives only passing mention in the White Paper’s annexures. It belongs in the body of the document as a mandatory condition, alongside a clear commitment to ring-fence revenue from basic services so that it funds the maintenance of the infrastructure that generated it, not unrelated budget pressures elsewhere in a municipality’s accounts.[6] Infrastructure assets are the basis on which municipalities deliver services to their citizens.
Linked to this is a reform the White Paper gestures towards but does not yet make sufficiently concrete: the municipal digital backbone. Across the sector, SAICE has observed the destruction of as-built drawings for major municipal assets. When those records are lost, so is the institutional memory required to maintain and rehabilitate the infrastructure. A municipal digital backbone, properly implemented, is not an IT project. It is infrastructure in itself, an engineering governance requirement, one that captures and preserves the technical knowledge embedded in South Africa’s public infrastructure for current and future generations. The White Paper must treat it as such.[7]
None of this works without the people who live alongside the infrastructure. Where communities and, in rural areas, traditional leaders are brought into infrastructure planning as genuine partners rather than late-stage consultees, projects represent real needs and see less vandalism and fewer disputes. The White Paper’s proposed compacts between municipalities and traditional councils are a meaningful step. SAICE believes they should go further, with traditional leadership formally signed into the infrastructure planning process itself, not only a parallel agreement alongside it.[8]
A climate mandate needs climate funding
The White Paper correctly identifies climate resilience as a municipal obligation. SAICE supports this perspective, but identifying an obligation without a funding mechanism to meet it is, in practical terms, an unfunded mandate. The municipalities most exposed to climate risk, coastal, flood-prone, drought-affected, are frequently the least financially capacitated to respond. SAICE calls on the White Paper to propose a dedicated, ring-fenced Climate Infrastructure Resilience Grant, administered through National Treasury in consultation with CoGTA and supported by technically credible condition assessments conducted by registered professionals.[9]
What November’s ballot cannot do on its own
“Every five years, communities are promised that this time will be different. As engineering professionals, we want to give people more than a promise. We want to give them a structure that makes the promise possible to keep,” says Phayane-Shakhane. That structure is being written right now, in the White Paper.
SAICE’s message to policymakers is one of clarity, not alarm. The diagnosis in the White Paper is largely correct. What it needs now is implementation architecture that matches the ambition of that diagnosis: a single-tier model with performance-linked powers and genuine technical handover, professional registration for senior technical roles, real-time accountability backed by project readiness certification, lifecycle costing as a non-negotiable planning requirement, ring-fenced maintenance revenue, a digital backbone treated as engineering governance, communities and traditional leaders engaged as genuine partners, and a dedicated funding stream for climate resilience that reaches the municipalities that need it most.
South Africa has the policy expertise; what has been missing is the implementation architecture to turn good policy into good infrastructure. The White Paper is the opportunity to break that pattern. Civil engineering professionals have worked in this sector long enough to know the difference between a document that changes things and one that does not. This one can, if the architecture is right. Whether it does will depend on the choices made in the coming weeks. South Africa needs policy that survives contact with reality, and with the right implementation architecture, this White Paper can be exactly that.
For more information, visit https://saice.org.za
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