The water crisis in South Africa’s Eastern Cape: A gap between policy and reality.
Eastern Cape government policy often echoes national directives promising better access to water and sanitation through infrastructure refurbishment and diversification of water sources. Yet this alignment exists more in official strategy documents than in the daily lives of rural communities who still lack reliable access to safe water. Across the province, millions of rands have been spent on projects that stall, incur cost overruns, or fail to deliver the services they were meant to provide. In some instances, municipalities have been placed under investigation for irregular expenditure and maladministration related to water infrastructure grants, with the Special Investigating Unit probing multiple key projects in the Alfred Nzo District that were not properly administered under the relevant financial and supply chain regulations. These probes, which cover planning, implementation, and payments over nearly a decade, underscore how systemic governance issues have eroded the integrity of public spending and left vital needs unfulfilled.
