Business Leadership South Africa (BLSA) CEO Busi Mavuso has issued a stark warning about the accelerating collapse of municipal water infrastructure in South Africa, arguing that the crisis poses a direct and immediate threat to business continuity and that election-year political dynamics risk making the situation significantly worse before it improves.
Writing in her weekly column, Mavuso drew on comments made by Sean Phillips, director general in the Department of Water and Sanitation, who described a “vicious downward spiral” gripping water services across a large number of municipalities. Phillips cited the Johannesburg metro as an example of how far deterioration has advanced — the city cannot afford to transport workers to sites to repair leaks, and currently loses approximately 35% of its water supply as a result. In eThekwini, Mavuso notes, the situation is more severe still, with close to half of all water processed by the municipality failing to reach paying customers.
Mavuso frames the problem not as a resource constraint but as a governance failure. Water services in South Africa are structured to be self-sustaining, with revenue from water sales intended to fund infrastructure maintenance. Instead, she argues, that revenue is being diverted to other purposes, starving the system of the investment it needs and locking municipalities into a deteriorating cycle they lack the financial capacity to break. The Auditor General’s review of the 2023–24 municipal financial year found that only 41 of 257 municipalities received clean audits, with the office concluding that local government “remains in a dire state.”
The commercial consequences, Mavuso argues, extend across virtually every sector of the economy. Manufacturing plants face production shutdowns when supply becomes unreliable. Hotels, restaurants and retail centres dependent on consistent municipal water face operational disruption. Commercial property values fall when tenants cannot rely on basic services. Agricultural operations face uncertainty over irrigation. And beyond the immediate operational risks, she warns, deteriorating municipal finances signal rising rates and service charges even as actual service quality declines — a compounding burden on businesses already navigating a constrained economic environment.
What concerns Mavuso most, however, is the political logic of the current moment. With local government elections approaching, she argues the incentive structures for many incumbents run directly counter to improved governance. She invokes the political science concept of “lame duck looting” — the tendency of officeholders facing a high probability of electoral defeat to maximise short-term extraction rather than invest in longer-term service improvements. Infrastructure maintenance, she notes, delivers its political dividends slowly, through improved reliability over time. Where that calculus no longer works for an incumbent, the rational short-term alternative is extraction. The result, in her assessment, is that the downward spiral is likely to accelerate precisely when businesses most need stability.
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The contrast with Cape Town, Mavuso argues, demonstrates that the crisis is a product of choice rather than circumstance. The Western Cape metro, with a population comparable to Johannesburg, allocated a capital budget of R12.1 billion last year against Johannesburg’s R7.1 billion. It is the only metropolitan municipality to have received a clean audit, and its water and sanitation directorate spent 94.1% of its capital budget — more than the combined infrastructure spending of Johannesburg and eThekwini. Mavuso’s point is pointed: the governance tools exist and they work when applied.
She acknowledges that a range of accountability mechanisms are in place — accounting officers carry personal liability for irregular expenditure, the Special Investigating Unit can be activated by presidential proclamation, and Operation Vulindlela includes provisions to ringfence utility revenue for infrastructure maintenance. Minister of Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs Velenkosini Hlabisa has engaged business leaders on collective action, and BLSA itself is actively supporting municipal capacity-building. The limitation, Mavuso argues, is that most of these mechanisms are designed for longer-term systemic correction or post-facto accountability — “after investigations conclude and charges are prosecuted.” What the current moment requires, in her view, is proactive vigilance capable of preventing damage rather than prosecuting it after the fact.
Mavuso’s call to action spans multiple constituencies. She urges provincial treasuries, auditors, the police and investigative institutions to be “particularly alert at this moment.” She calls on investigative journalists to pursue emerging malfeasance with rigour, and on citizens to exercise their votes as the ultimate check on political power. For the business community specifically, she argues that passive observation is not an option: “We cannot afford to watch this crisis unfold passively. The taps failing and lights going out don’t just affect households. They shut down businesses, eliminate jobs, and destroy the economic foundation that funds the very services we need.”
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