By André Opperman, Managing Director, Rolfes Water
I have spent more than 36 years in water treatment, and I can tell you this: the conversations I am having with plant managers in 2026 are fundamentally different from those I had five years ago.
Back then, we spoke about efficiency gains, cost optimisation, and marginal improvements. Today, the questions are more direct. Can I keep my plant running if municipal supply fails? What happens when the next water shortage notice comes through? How do we protect our people when compliance collapses?
These are not theoretical concerns. According to the Department of Water and Sanitation’s latest assessments, nearly half of South Africa’s treated water never reaches its destination. It is lost to leakage, theft, or system failure before it gets to the tap. At the same time, microbiological compliance across municipal systems has deteriorated sharply. In 2014, just 5% of assessed systems showed poor or critical compliance. Today, that figure is close to 50%.
For anyone running an industrial operation, these numbers represent something very real: production risk, safety exposure, and regulatory liability. Water has stopped being a utility you can take for granted. It has become a strategic asset you have to secure yourself.
When the Assumption Breaks
For decades, industrial water planning was built on a simple assumption: municipal supply would be there when you needed it. Reliable. Consistent. Safe.
That assumption no longer holds. I have seen beverage plants forced into emergency shutdowns because incoming water quality failed mid-batch. I have watched mining operations scramble to truck in water when local systems went offline for weeks. I have sat in boardrooms where executives realised, often for the first time, that their entire production model depended on infrastructure that was quietly falling apart.
The Blue Drop and No Drop reports make this clear. National non-revenue water losses now sit at 47.4%. That means nearly half the water entering the system disappears before anyone can use it. For businesses already dealing with constrained supply, this is not just inefficiency. It is a material risk to continuity.
Plant managers and facilities engineers understand this instinctively. Water availability and quality are no longer constants. They are variables that need to be actively managed. And increasingly, that means bringing the solution in-house.
Water Moves to the Boardroom
Something shifted in the last few years. Water stopped being an engineering problem and became a C-suite priority.
The PricewaterhouseCoopers South Africa Economic Outlook for 2025 identifies water shortages as one of the most significant domestic business risks. The report does not mince words. It explicitly advises companies to install backup systems on municipal feeds and implement water reuse and recirculation. This is not coming from environmentalists or regulators. It is coming from accountants and risk analysts.
When water enters the boardroom, the conversation changes. It stops being about technical fixes and starts being about resilience, continuity, and long-term viability. Capital gets allocated differently. Projects that were once considered nice-to-have suddenly become essential.
This is where operational resilience in water management becomes critical. At Rolfes Water, we have built our Total Water and Risk Management services around this reality. It is not just about treating water. It is about providing structured oversight across the full cycle, from raw intake to final discharge, so that risks get identified early and managed proactively, not reactively.
Decentralised Systems Become Standard Practice
Engineering News recently described 2026 as a defining year for water resilience in southern Africa. I think they are right. The experts they have cited warn that South Africa faces a 17% supply deficit by 2030, and large-scale infrastructure expansion simply is not going to close that gap in time.
What this means in practice is that decentralised water treatment systems are becoming the default, not the exception. If you are planning a new facility, or expanding an existing one, you are almost certainly designing for on-site treatment. Treating water at the point of use gives you control over quality, lets you reuse processed water, and reduces your dependence on networks that cannot keep up with demand.
I see this across the continent, not just in South Africa. In mining, in agri-processing, in manufacturing, the approach is the same: don’t wait for state infrastructure. Build your own water independence.
Through our integration with Solevo Group‘s pan-African distribution network, we are able to support operations beyond South Africa’s borders. The expertise, the chemistry, the engineering support travels with the operation. You are not relying on local utilities that may or may not be there when you need them.
What the Resilience Dividend Actually Looks Like
When I talk about the resilience dividend, I am not referring to an abstract benefit. I am talking about measurable outcomes that show up in your operations and your financials.
Reduced downtime because you are not vulnerable to municipal outages. Predictable operating costs because you have stabilised your water input. Improved audit outcomes because you control your own compliance. Greater investor confidence because you have de-risked a critical input.
Sites that treat water as a strategic asset absorb disruption better. They maintain output when others can’t. They grow when others stall.
Operationally, this means integrating treatment chemistry, system design, monitoring, and risk assessment into a single managed approach. Water stops being a variable cost that spikes unexpectedly. It becomes a managed input with known parameters and controlled performance.
In practical terms, you are looking at water reuse and recirculation systems that cut intake volumes, stabilise tariff exposure, and lower discharge costs. You are implementing continuous monitoring that supports compliance and protects your workforce. You are building redundancy so that a single failure does not take down the entire operation.
This is proactive risk management, not reactive crisis response.
ESG and Economic Fundamentals Align
There is a tendency to treat ESG as a separate consideration, something you layer on top of core operations to satisfy investors or meet reporting requirements. But when it comes to water, the environmental case and the economic case are the same thing.
Decentralised water systems are increasingly recognised within global sustainability frameworks. The United Nations Development Programme’s Sustainable Development Goal Investor Platform identifies them as a key mechanism for achieving SDG 6, which focuses on clean water and sanitation.
But beyond the sustainability angle, these systems simply make financial sense. Resource recovery from wastewater improves project economics. Reduced reliance on municipal supply limits your exposure to tariff escalation, which in South Africa has consistently outpaced inflation. For investors looking at long-term resilience, ESG-aligned water management is not a compliance exercise. It is a financial hedge.
Water as Infrastructure, Not Service
The industrial water landscape across Africa is changing, and it is not changing back.
Water is no longer something that gets delivered to you as a background service. It is infrastructure you need to own, govern, and invest in directly. It requires executive oversight, capital allocation, and strategic planning, just like energy or logistics.
Decentralised water treatment systems sit at the centre of this transition. They protect operations against infrastructure failure. They enable growth in regions where traditional supply models have already broken down. They give you the independence to scale without waiting for someone else to build the pipes.
As African industrial infrastructure continues to expand, the organisations securing their water independence now will be the ones positioned to grow over the next decade. The resilience dividend is not theoretical. It is real, it is measurable, and increasingly, it is the difference between businesses that thrive and those that stall.
If you are still relying entirely on municipal supply, the question is not whether you will face disruption. It is when, and whether you will be ready.
