Consulting Engineers South Africa’s (CESA) has welcomed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s release of the National Water Action Plan (NWAP), but is cautioning that infrastructure investment and institutional reform will only deliver results if South Africa urgently closes the technical skills gap in its water and wastewater sector.

CESA is calling on national and provincial government, municipalities, water boards and private sector partners implementing the NWAP to incorporate structured, ongoing technical training into all phases of the Plan’s rollout, from the immediate stabilisation of failing systems to the long-term institutional reforms National Water Crisis Committee (WATERCOM) has been mandated to drive.

The NWAP, released on 23 July 2026 following a meeting of WATERCOM at the Union Buildings, sets out a programme of short-, medium- and long-term interventions to address the country’s escalating water crisis. It identifies an inappropriate delivery model, including the absence of ring-fenced water revenues and diffused accountability between billing, revenue collection and technical departments, as the root causes of failing services in many municipalities.

“The plan has correctly diagnosed the institutional and financial failures behind the crisis, but no amount of ring-fencing or reform will hold water if there aren’t enough competent people to run the plants, maintain the assets and make sound engineering decisions on the ground,” states CESA CEO Chris Campbell.

“Government has done the hard work of naming the disease. Ring-fenced revenue, clear accountability, private sector investment, are the prescriptions required. You can reform a municipality’s books all you like; if there is no qualified process controller on shift at the treatment works, if nobody on site understands hydraulic design or can troubleshoot a failing plant, the taps still run dry and the rivers still turn green.

“We have seen this movie before with load shedding. Fixing the institutions bought Eskom time, but it was engineering and operational capability that has made the real difference which has up to now kept the lights on. We cannot dismiss the realities of the unfortunate reduced industrial demand, combined with residential, commercial and mining houses all implementing various forms of self-help renewable energy systems for their own energy security, all of which have contributed to the lesser demand on Eskom. Water needs exactly the same discipline, technically, operationally and financially through demand and supply management as a water scarce country,” Campbell highlights.

He notes that South Africa’s Blue Drop and Green Drop performance, the national benchmarks for drinking water and wastewater quality, has declined in direct correlation to the loss of technical skills from municipalities over the past three decades and reversing this trend requires sustained, practical, engineering-led skills development, not short term interventions on the eve of looming local government elections.

“The warning lights had come on more than two decades ago and just as in the case of our energy crisis, we kicked the can down the road up to now,” he adds.

“Every Blue Drop failure and every Green Drop failure I have seen has a lack of skills story behind it. Engineers, technicians, technologists and process controllers who left or retired from public sector weren’t replaced and incumbents if available were never adequately trained in the first place. The NWAP gives us the institutional architecture to fix this. It’s success depends on whether we treat capacity and competency development as core, and not as a nice-to-have that gets cut when budgets tighten,” Campbell adds.

“This requires a pipeline of competent, professionally registered local practitioners who can take responsibility for these assets and keep them operating for the next 30 years and beyond. Skills development is therefore not separate from the water response. It is one of the foundations on which the response must be built,” he notes.

“The long-term success of the NWAP will ultimately be measured by whether the infrastructure and institutional improvements remain functional and effective over time,” concludes Campbell.