Water risk used to be discussed as a climate question in South Africa, framed around dam levels and rainfall. The reports published over the past three years have moved the conversation somewhere less comfortable. The systems that treat and distribute water are measured annually, and the measurements have been going the wrong way.

For households this shows up as interrupted supply, pressure drops and boil-water notices, which we covered in water shedding in South Africa. For a business it shows up later and costs more: a shift that cannot run, a kitchen that cannot open, a ward that cannot admit, a guest who does not come back.

Two national assessments matter. Green Drop measures wastewater treatment. Blue Drop measures drinking water supply. Both are published by the Department of Water and Sanitation.

Two things stand out. The first is direction: on every measure the trend is downward, and the decline in excellent-rated works is as telling as the rise in critical ones. The second is spread. These are national totals made up of municipal results, and the variation between municipalities is wider than any national average suggests.

A treatment works in a critical state is not a works that has stopped. It is one whose risk rating indicates that failure is likely without intervention, measured across effluent quality, capacity, technical skills, process control and maintenance.

That distinction matters commercially. A critical rating is a forward-looking signal, not a record of an outage. It tells an operations team that the margin for error at that works has gone, and that the next equipment failure, staff departure or demand spike is more likely to become an interruption. It is the closest thing South African business has to an early warning system on water, and almost nobody in the private sector reads it.

National percentages are abstract. A single municipality is not. Mangaung, the metro covering Bloemfontein, was examined in detail by GroundUp in September 2026 using departmental compliance data and the municipality's own audited financial statements.

Read those four lines together and the shape of the problem is clear. This is not a municipality short of water. It is a municipality that cannot account for what it buys, cannot treat what it discharges, and therefore cannot fund the maintenance that would fix either.

Non-revenue water is water that is produced and paid for but never billed, lost to physical leaks, meter under-registration, billing errors and unauthorised use. It is the single most useful number for understanding why a municipality with adequate bulk supply still cannot deliver reliably.

The logic runs in one direction. Losses reduce revenue. Reduced revenue shrinks the maintenance budget. Deferred maintenance increases losses. Each turn of that cycle makes the next intervention more expensive, which is why the problem compounds rather than plateaus, and why it rarely resolves without capital and capability arriving from outside the cycle.

The Water Services Amendment Bill [B24 - 2025] amends the Water Services Act of 1997. Public comment closed in February 2026. In substance it introduces:

• Licensing for municipal entities that deliver water services, replacing the current position in which a municipality may provide services without a licence.
• Registration for those who install and operate water services works.
• A water services licensing authority, with powers of inspection.
• Expanded governance requirements for water boards, and new offences and penalties.

Licensing creates a standard and a consequence, which is real progress on accountability. It does not by itself add a single qualified operator to a treatment works, and the skills gap is the binding constraint at most of the plants rated critical. Writing in Engineering News in September 2026, Kwikot managing director Murray Crow put the structural point in one line:

"Water is not a secondary infrastructure issue. It is the infrastructure beneath the economy."

Murray Crow, Managing Director, Kwikot Powered by Haier, Engineering News, 28 September 2026

Closing that gap is slow work and it starts with training. Kwikot runs the Kwikot Future Skills Experience to build water heating and trade talent for exactly this reason.

Because the risk is municipal, it has to be assessed per site. Ten questions, in the order they are worth asking.

1. Which municipality supplies each of your sites, and how did that municipality score in the latest Green Drop and Blue Drop assessments?
2. What is your actual daily water demand per site, in kilolitres, and how much of it is non-negotiable to keep operating?
3. How long can each site run on stored water before it stops? Count in hours, not days.
4. Where does your site lose water? Metering and leak detection on your own property is the cheapest water you will ever recover.
5. If supply is interrupted, what happens to sanitation? In most buildings that fails before production does.
6. Do you have a tested water quality position, or are you assuming municipal compliance?
7. What is the plan for drinking water for staff and visitors, and does it depend on the same supply that just failed?
8. Who is the named contact at the municipality, and when did you last speak to them about something other than a complaint?
9. What capability could your business offer that municipality: engineering, maintenance, metering, artisan training, finance?
10. Which of the above is in writing, with an owner and a review date?

The first nine are diagnostic. The tenth is the one that decides whether anything changes.

Murray Crow, Managing Director of Kwikot Powered by Haier, set out the case for private sector involvement in South Africa Cannot Wait for Government to Fix the Water Crisis, published in Engineering News on 28 September 2026.

For the household view of the same problem, see water shedding in South Africa.

About Kwikot

Established in 1903, Kwikot is South Africa's leading provider of water heating solutions. With a focus on innovation and sustainability, Kwikot offers a range of products including electric geysers, solar water heaters, gas water heaters and heat pumps. Now part of Haier, Kwikot continues to drive progress in the water heating industry, delivering reliable and energy-efficient solutions to homes and businesses across South Africa.