It will be three years before South Africa starts to fully recover from the intense drought that has exacerbated its already-dry conditions over the past few years; however, the country will always be a naturally water-scarce country that needs careful water management.

Briefing media in Kempton Park after the first official MinMEC on water and sanitation since the fifth administration, Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane warned that the country still faced a dire water shortage situation and that citizens needed to use water sparingly.

MinMECs involve the national Minister responsible for a certain portfolio meeting with provincial officials to discuss issues of significance, and were at one time regularly held.

Mokonyane’s comments followed the governmental meeting with the MECs responsible for cooperative governance across South Africa’s nine provinces, where greater collaboration is being sought between the stakeholders as the country faces permanent water challenges.

The closed meeting unpacked the Department of Water and Sanitation’s yearly delivery performance plans, the newly adopted National Sanitation Policy and the serious drought conditions threatening the nation’s water security.

“We have never been hit by a drought of this magnitude . . . It is the realities of climate change that have exacerbated the [normally] cyclical period of South Africa’s drought.

“In as much as we have had rain  . . . we are still firmly in a drought and have not recovered sufficiently enough to remove the [current water] restrictions,” Mokonyane said.

“We are not, in the foreseeable future, going to be out of the woods,” she stressed, reiterating that South Africans had to keep in mind that the country was among the top 30 driest countries worldwide, and would remain so.

This meant that South Africa’s interventions and solutions could be short-term focused, and all stakeholders, from government and municipalities to citizens, needed to collaborate – from urgent infrastructure upgrades and maintenance, the synergies of plans at all levels of national, provincial and local government to a reduction in consumer water use – to mitigate these challenges.