Ivo is wrong - the private sector has not made much difference to the water sector. Last week, Tim Harford, the Financial Times' 'Undercover Economist' commented that Britain's water privatisation "was a disappointment".  In SA, Mbombela's 'success' was helped by excluding most of the municipality's poor people from its mandate and then asking national government to fund its capital expansion. So it is not surprising that the big international multinationals are no longer trying very hard for emerging country services business. 

Aside from being a very complex and local business, not particularly amenable to economies of scale,  water is a resource with many valueS - social, cultural and environmental - that have to be protected by regulation, further complicating the notion of water as a 'business'.  

But Ivo is right that we still have substantial volumes of water available; it's the engineering and management that's complicated - as the DA has discovered in Cape Town!