THE South African Institution of Civil Engineering (Saice) has spent significant time analysing the Draft White Paper on Local Government, where comments were submitted on 28 May 2026. The body highlights areas where it believes the policy is commendable, and where it falls short.
“Our view of the White Paper is that it correctly identifies what is broken, and with the right implementation architecture, it has the potential to become the document that finally changes things on the ground,” says Sekadi Phayane-Shakhane, chief executive officer at Saice.
Rethinking constitutional mandates
According to Saice, one of the most important areas that the White Paper gets right is its diagnosis of constitutional autonomy as a structural barrier. Under the current framework, municipalities hold constitutional protection over infrastructure functions, including water, sanitation and electricity distribution, regardless of whether they have the technical capacity to deliver them. The result is a system that protects dysfunction, rather than the delivery of Constitutional rights to the residents.
Part of the answer is structural, says Saice. South Africa’s current two-tier system, where district and local municipalities often hold overlapping powers in the same area, has frequently produced competition rather than co-operation. The result is bulk infrastructure, like treatment works, planned by one entity while the local pipe network that should connect to it is planned by another. The outcome is exactly what it sounds like: infrastructure that does not reach the people it was built for. Saice supports the White Paper’s move towards a single-tier model with clearly assigned mandates, paired with a performance-linked system in which a municipality that cannot manage a function, such as water reticulation, does not retain it indefinitely.
The Drop Reports, released on 31 March 2026, laid this bare in numbers showing what should concern every South African, says Saice. Nationally, 47.3% of treated water is lost or unbilled before it reaches a tap, representing approximately R9.9 billion in losses every year. National water use is running 13% above available resources. Meanwhile, 47% of municipal wastewater treatment systems, 396 out of 848 assessed, are in a critical state, worsening from 39% in the 2021/22 assessment.
These are not numbers from a single failed municipality. They reflect a systemic pattern. Saice is clear that any reassignment of powers must carry a non-negotiable condition: technical capacity, registered engineering professionals, asset records, maintenance budgets and operational systems must follow the function. Transferring a mandate without transferring the means to deliver it simply moves the failure to a new address. This is also why Saice supports the White Paper’s position that professional registration with bodies such as the Engineering Council of South Africa (Ecsa) should be a non-negotiable prerequisite for appointment into senior technical leadership roles overseeing infrastructure and water services. That single requirement shifts the conversation from needing more people to needing accountable, qualified people.
Accountability gap not closed
The White Paper proposes strengthening oversight and accountability structures, which Saice welcomes. But it relies too heavily on Auditor-General (AG) outcomes as the trigger for consequence management. AG findings are retrospective. They arrive, in many cases, years after the infrastructure damage has already been done. Accountability must instead be linked to real-time infrastructure performance indicators, asset condition, maintenance backlogs, service interruptions, technical vacancy rates, and vested in an independent, technically competent oversight function rather than council structures exposed to the same political pressures that produced the failure in the first place.
Saice also recommends a mandatory project readiness certification: no infrastructure project should proceed to procurement until registered professionals have certified that it is technically sound and properly planned, including stakeholder alignment. This would meaningfully reduce the delays, disputes, and cost overruns that currently plague municipal infrastructure delivery.
Saice supports extending the municipal manager term from five years to between seven and ten years. Infrastructure does not operate on electoral cycles. A water treatment works, for example, takes years to plan, fund, procure and build, and a manager whose term ends before the project does, has little incentive to prioritise it. But longer tenure without real-time, independent
consequence management simply creates a longer window for entrenched failure. Both reforms must move together.
Saice warns that the human resources picture adds urgency. The municipal water sector currently carries a 28% vacancy rate, with 7,426 positions unfilled, many of them technical and engineering roles that directly affect the safety and reliability of the infrastructure communities depend on.
Lifecycle planning
“The construction of new infrastructure is only the beginning of its story. What determines long-term value is the commitment to maintain, refurbish, and eventually renew that asset over its full operational life. The White Paper must make lifecycle costing a mandatory planning requirement, or the infrastructure delivered today will become the emergency expenditure of tomorrow,” says Phayane-Shakhane.
Between 41% and 60% of municipal capital budgets should, by established standards, be directed towards asset renewal. In practice, operational funding pressures consume those budgets before maintenance is reached. The White Paper must make lifecycle costing a front-door requirement for every infrastructure project: no approval, no funding, no classification as bankable, without a full account of what the asset will cost to maintain, refurbish, and eventually replace.
