(Photo: iStock)
The latest blue drop and green drop report, which measures, among other things, the state of South Africa’s drinking water quality, water purification and water use, was launched on Tuesday. Although according to Pemmy Majodina, Minister of Water and Sanitation, there has been a slight improvement, the country’s water situation is still “deeply worrying”.
The reports show, among other things, that the condition of the country’s waste water treatment plants, despite various interventions, is continuously deteriorating.
Gauteng and the Western Cape are doing the best, while Mpumalanga and the North West have shown significant improvement, Majodina said during the launch of the reports. The Northern Cape continues to perform poorly, while the situation in the Free State is one of “substantial concern”.
Majodina appealed to municipalities, engineers and other water specialists to use the reports as a turning point. “Look at it honestly, develop corrective plans, strengthen operations, fill critical vacancies, restore discipline and act with urgency. Communities cannot live with broken promises or polluted rivers.
“To the people of South Africa: You have every right to insist on better. Your water, your sanitation, your health and your dignity are non-negotiable.”
More and more systems are failing
(Archive photo)
After the release of the latest blue drop, green drop and no drop report – which assesses different components of the same system – AfriForum warned that its analysis indicates that the entire water supply chain is increasingly weakening.
The 2025 green drop report assessed sewage treatment and the impact of sewage works on rivers and the environment. The 2025 blue drop progress report evaluated drinking water quality and whether water supplied to consumers is safe for human consumption. The 2025 zero-drip progress report focused on water losses, non-revenue water and the efficiency of municipal water use.
Together, this provides a complete picture of the state of South Africa’s water supply system, which according to AfriForum is deteriorating by the day.
The 2025 green drop report reaffirmed the deterioration of sewage treatment by indicating, among other things, the percentage of municipal sewage systems that are in critical condition.
Those systems, which did not reach the minimum green drop threshold of 31% and are considered dysfunctional, increased from 39% in 2022 to 47% in 2025. Compliance with sewage works effluent is extremely low, with microbiological compliance at 35% and chemical compliance at 48%.
The number of green drop certified systems decreased from 22 to 14. In practice, this means that more sewage works fail and more untreated sewage ends up in rivers.
The 2025 blue drop progress report also shows no significant improvement since the 2023 audit. In terms of microbiological compliance, 49% of systems are classified as high risk. Chemical compliance is even worse, with 63% of systems placed in the high risk category. The national risk profile remained unchanged, which confirms that the systemic problems that were already identified in 2023 have not been dealt with, says AfriForum.
The 2025 zero-drop progress report shows that water losses remain unchanged. Non-revenue water still represents about 47% of all water losses, meaning that almost half of treated water is lost or not paid for.
Actual water losses remain at 32% of system input and the infrastructure leakage index has weakened to around 7.5, indicating poor performance. At the same time, water use now exceeds available supply by 13%. Despite the R1.9 billion spent on, among other things, water saving efforts, non-revenue water increased by 87.9 million cubic meters per year.
The report also attributes the apparent improvement in risk ratings to better submission of data, not to an actual improvement in performance.
Vicious cycle
Untreated sewage seeps from a sewage treatment plant in Standerton in Mpumalanga, into the Vaal River, visible in the background. (Archive photo: Steve Kretzmann)
“Together, the three reports indicate a complete collapse of an interconnected system. Sewerage plants dump untreated sewage into rivers, increasing pressure on drinking water systems. At the same time, municipalities are losing nearly half of their treated water, forcing increased withdrawal from already overused resources. This creates a vicious cycle in which pollution reduces the availability of clean water; water treatment plants cannot keep up; and inefficiencies in distribution drive demand for a shrinking resource further increased,” says Marais de Vaal, AfriForum’s advisor for environmental affairs.
The same problems are also in all three reports: Large amounts of water losses, inadequate sewage treatment and unsafe drinking water.
The diagnosis of these problems, which can be mainly attributed to skills shortages and weak institutional capacity, has already been detailed in the DWS’s 2023 reports. The latest reports show that these issues have not been tackled in the following three years and that conditions have either stabilized or deteriorated further.
“If the previous round of reports’ role was to identify the problems, these latest reports point to the government’s failure to act. With no significant improvement in three years, the data is an indictment of a government that is unable to take the real, coordinated steps needed to stabilize the water sector. The consequences are already visible in a decline in water quality, increasing interruptions in supply and growing risks to public health and the environment,” said De Vaal.
AfriForum now demands accountability at municipal and national level and emphasizes that the technical expertise and the capacity of the private sector are needed to stabilize service delivery.
“Without effective intervention and a move towards competent, accountable management, the ongoing deterioration of water infrastructure will accelerate, with serious consequences for communities, the economy and the environment,” says De Vaal.