The Institute of Municipal Engineering of Southern Africa (IMESA) has welcomed President Cyril Ramaphosa’s National Water Action Plan (NWAP) but says that the professional registration of senior municipal officials should be a central pillar of the strategy. The organisation asserts that water sector reform will only succeed if municipalities are led by competent, professionally registered officials who are accountable to both their municipality and their professional body.

The NWAP, which was released by the President in July 2026, sets out short, medium and long-term interventions aimed at securing a reliable supply of quality water to all South Africans. It includes increased infrastructure investment, legal and regulatory reform, and measures to address corruption and criminality in the water sector.

IMESA president Geoff Tooley says that the plan’s emphasis on institutional reform should include the professional registration of senior municipal officials.

Tooley explains that the specific profession in which the administrators are registered is not important. “Senior officials could come from disciplines including law, town planning, engineering, accounting or land surveying, provided they are professionally registered with the relevant body.” The benefit of this, he says, is that professional registration will create a dual accountability framework: senior officials will be accountable to their municipalities while also being subject to the standards and requirements of their professional bodies.

“This will give professional ethics greater weight in public administration. Failure to act professionally could ultimately affect an official’s professional status and, where professional registration is a requirement of the post, their ability to remain in that position.

“This would make accountability and professional ethics paramount and this culture would permeate through our public organisations. The right decisions would be made for the right reasons, supporting a turnaround in service delivery.”

IMESA director Bhavna Soni says that the immediate priority should also be to stabilise and maintain the infrastructure already in place. “Getting back to basics means fixing what we have,” she stresses, highlighting the importance of adequate maintenance budget allocations for managing and stabilising existing water systems.

Soni welcomes the NWAP’s commitment to ring-fencing water revenues, noting that financial sustainability is critical to the future of municipal water and sanitation services. Reducing non-revenue water (NRW) and increasing water sales are similarly vital to improve financial sustainability. “To achieve this, we need mechanisms to formalise service arrangements and revenue collection in rural areas and informal settlements,” Soni states. “With informal settlements expanding, the scope for cross-subsidisation is becoming more difficult, making sustainable revenue collection increasingly important.”

Soni calls for disaster-related damage to water infrastructure to be funded separately through National Treasury disaster funding, rather than placing additional pressure on normal municipal water and sanitation budgets.

She, too, stresses the importance of registered professionals at senior levels in municipalities. “Competent people are critical to financial sustainability, water security and better service delivery. Whatever their background – whether they are engineers, accountants or lawyers – they must be registered with and accountable to their professional body.”

In addition to competence and professionalism, Soni says that ethical leadership is essential to improve municipal performance. “True leadership means guiding others with integrity, honesty, fairness and personal responsibility while focusing on the common good rather than personal gain.”

The NWAP identifies weaknesses in the existing municipal water-services model, including the use of water revenues to fund other municipal functions, which reduces resources available for maintenance, investment and skilled staff. It also identifies diffuse accountability as a factor weakening incentives for effective and financially sustainable water management.
Soni notes that the Metro Trading Services Reform (MTSR) framework addresses these issues effectively through its seven-box matrix but says and that the effective implementation of the programme is critical.

She contends that one of the most vital reforms is to ensure that every municipality’s Water and Sanitation Unit operates as a utility. This means treating these services like a self-sustaining business that must manage its own funds, operations and infrastructure efficiently rather than relying strictly on municipal general budgets.

IMESA believes that the NWAP provides an important national framework, but its success will ultimately depend on its implementation at municipal level, including financial discipline, infrastructure maintenance, effective revenue management and ethical, accountable, professional leadership.