“The regulation function was to some extent neglected,” water affairs acting chief director of regulations Helgard Muller told members of Parliament’s water affairs portfolio committee.

“Let me admit, I think that immediately after 1994, and for some years, this function was not getting the right attention… We had to prioritise due to limited resources,” he said.

Muller’s admission comes a fortnight after the release of his department’s Green Drop Report, which assessed 449 of the country’s 852 waste water treatment plants.

It found only 32 of them qualified for so-called Green Drop status, broadly equivalent to them complying with international standards.

Further, it found that “the bulk of the (sewage) plants can be described as poor to non-functional”, implying that hundreds of millions of litres of inadequately-treated sewage was being illegally discharged each day, mainly by small town municipalities.

R23bn – the amount Water Affairs Minister Buyelwa Sonjica says she needs to patch up the country’s collapsing sewage works – was enough.

Democratic Alliance MP Annette Lovemore said the Western Cape alone required R8bn to solve its waste water problems.

“The Western Cape is by far one of the better-performing provinces, so R23bn for the country – I wonder if this is not a serious under-estimation,” she said.

South Africa’s extensive network of sewage treatments plants, pipe networks and pump stations treats about 7.5bn litres of waste water a day.