POTABLE WATER: MK TO TABLE LEGISLATION ON ACCURATE ACCESS INDICATOR

POTABLE WATER: MK TO TABLE LEGISLATION ON ACCURATE ACCESS INDICATOR

• 11 September 2026
• Water & Sanitation
• SA Legal Academy

uMkhonto weSizwe (MK) Party MP Mzwanele Manyi has announced his intention to table a Statistics Amendment Bill in Parliament with the aim of requiring the Statistician-General to ‘develop, compute and publish an annual potable water access indicator … to more accurately reflect actual access to potable water … that is reliably available, accessible on-premises, or nearby, and verified as safe in accordance with applicable national standards’.

With that in mind, the recently gazetted procedurally required pre-tabling executive summary of the legislation envisaged calls for input by 11 October 2026 on the proposals concerned, which also seek to address:

• ‘the persistent and material gap between reported access and lived reality arising from intermittent supply and infrastructure failure’
• ‘water quality concerns’, and
• ‘a fundamental deficiency in the manner in which access to water is currently measured … South Africa’.

According to the explanatory summary, ‘official statistics frequently rely on the presence of water infrastructure (such as a household tap or piped connections) as a proxy for access to potable water’. The resulting ‘conflation of the concepts of water infrastructure, water availability and potable water … may overstate access to potable water’, as well as information on whether it is ‘consistently available and suitable for human consumption’.

• explanatory summary

Published by SA Legal Academy Policy Watch

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