When President Cyril Ramaphosa announced at Sona 2026 that he would personally chair the National Water Crisis Committee, the message was unmistakable: coordination has failed.
South Africa has seen this pattern before.
In 2022, amid relentless load shedding, the Presidency established and chaired the National Energy Crisis Committee. What changed was not physics or engineering. It was authority. Regulatory delays were cut through. Departments aligned. Deadlines mattered. The political centre assumed ownership.
And the system responded.
Now water joins electricity as a crisis serious enough to warrant presidential command.
But this success story hides a deeper institutional problem.
Why does coordination in South Africa only function once it is elevated to the Presidency?
The country is not short of coordination structures. It has interministerial committees, sectoral forums, provincial oversight mechanisms and district development platforms. On paper, cooperative governance is dense. In practice, it is thin.
The issue is not architecture. It is enforcement.
Most coordination forums lack:
- Authority to compel action across departments and spheres;
- Shared performance metrics with consequences;
- Escalation mechanisms when targets fail; and
- Political cost for inertia.
So problems accumulate slowly and invisibly — until they explode.
Wastewater plants deteriorate for years. Bulk water infrastructure leaks billions of litres. Municipal maintenance budgets shrink. Intergovernmental meetings are held. Reports are tabled. Nothing fundamentally shifts.
Then taps run dry in major metros.
Suddenly, the Presidency intervenes.
Uncomfortable truth
The pattern suggests an uncomfortable truth: crises in South Africa are escalated not by systemic triggers but by political visibility.
A problem appears to “deserve” presidential coordination when:
- It threatens macroeconomic stability;
- It becomes nationally embarrassing;
- It triggers public protest;
- Media scrutiny intensifies; and
- Political risk rises
That is reactive governance.
The electricity crisis was framed as an economic emergency. The water crisis now carries similar weight. But housing backlogs, collapsing municipal finances, wastewater contamination and urban transport dysfunction also impose structural harm — just more quietly.
If coordination only works when centralised at the apex of political power, then lower-tier governance mechanisms are not self-executing. They are dependent.
This is not an argument against presidential intervention. On the contrary, it acknowledges its effectiveness. When authority centralises, implementation accelerates.
But that should alarm us.
A state that requires presidential chairing to align departments is not coordinated. It is crisis-dependent.
South Africa’s constitutional design is premised on cooperative governance. Spheres are meant to function concurrently, not sequentially — and certainly not only when summoned by the Presidency.
The real reform question is this: will the water crisis committee become another exceptional structure, or will its coordination model be institutionalised?
Because if electricity required presidential oversight to move, and water does too, then we must ask what else is quietly waiting for collapse before it qualifies for attention.
Coordination should not be a reward for catastrophe.
If South Africa is serious about reform, it needs:
- Clear national escalation criteria for service failure;
- Binding cross-sphere performance thresholds;
- Automatic intervention triggers before crisis peaks; and
- Measurable accountability for non-delivery.
Without those mechanisms, coordination remains discretionary.
And discretionary governance breeds fragility.
Powerful signal
The President chairing a crisis committee is a powerful signal. But signals are not systems.
If the lesson of electricity and water is that political authority unlocks performance, then the next step is to build institutions that do not depend on political drama to function.
Otherwise, the state will continue to lurch from one presidentially chaired emergency to the next — applauding coordination only after failure has become undeniable.
That is not reform.
That is escalation by embarrassment. DM
Sivenkosi Rashe holds a PhD in Public Administration and is a public policy analyst and local government coordination commentator.