Water security in South Africa Beyond scarcity and abundance
By Dr Pulane Molokwane Member of the National Planning Commission (NPC)
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n July 2020, the National Planning Commission (NPC) released the National Water Security Framework (NWSF) which redefines water security in South Africa. This report comes at a time when the country is grappling with the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic, which accentuated the challenges of poverty, unemployment and inequality. The report will serve as a constant reminder that water as a source of life requires high levels of stewardship. South Africa is no stranger to water challenges, given the need to balance temporal and spatial distribution to ensure socioeconomic development. Many great mega-projects were initiated as a way of addressing these challenges over the years. It is a foregone conclusion that these large multibillion-rand projects are now limited in scope for various reasons and that new innovative ways of ensuring water security have become a necessity. At the height of South Africa’s energy crisis between 2014 and 2015, difficult questions began to emerge about the probability of the water
sector experiencing the shortages that were being experienced in the energy sector. A diagnostic report was commissioned to assess the situation and it recommended a high-level Integrated National Water Plan to avert the potential crisis. Subsequently, the NPC embarked on a detailed assessment of the implementation of the NDP, leading to the development of the first NWSF for South Africa. The NWSF takes into account that given South Africa’s unfavourable hydroclimatic conditions, apartheid legacy and national development imperatives, the country cannot afford a water crisis, and that there was a need to address the triple challenges of poverty, inequality and unemployment.
It ought to be at the core of planning in order to achieve the goals espoused in the NDP The report coincided with the tenth anniversary of the United Nations’ (UN) declaration of access to water as a human right last year. By the
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time this landmark declaration was made, South Africa already had a head start in terms of moving from ‘water rights’ to ‘water use rights’, which was embedded in the Constitution through the Bill of Rights and subsequently through legislation. Water security as a concept has become pervasive in scholastic, public and private spaces alike. It is envisaged that the NWSF will take the water project for South Africa beyond the ‘access’ mantra, to enabling the hydro-social and economic development levels. This would be in line with the national imperatives as articulated in the NDP vision 2030, that ‘… each and every one of us is intimately and inextricably of this earth with its beauty and life-giving sources; that our lives on earth are both enriched and complicated by what we have contributed to its condition.’ Water is seen through the lens of its various dimensions in life systems beyond its material nature. The first edition of the NWSF revitalises the global definition of water security and further localises it by taking into account
