More than three-quarters of South African households receive free water and more than half receive free electricity, Statistics South Africa (Stats SA) said in Pretoria on Thursday.
The figures are part of a non-financial census of municipalities for the year ending June 2003.
The census found that 75,7% of households received free basic water and 57,3% of households received free electricity.
The report provided information at a district municipal level and excluded water services provided by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry or community water services and electricity services provided by Eskom.
”The report released today reflects the supply side, what the municipalities have said they are providing,” said Stats SA head Pali Lehohla at the media briefing.
Lehohla said a next step in the statistics compilation process will be to capture figures for the demand side — what municipal residents said they need.
But while 5,9-million households had free water and 2,4-million had free electricity, there were two million households without toilet facilities.
The best-performing municipalities on average were in the Free State, where 91,5% of households had free water and 90,3% had free electricity.
The poorest-performing municipalities on average were in the Western Cape, with 58% of households receiving free water, and in KwaZulu-Natal, where 4,1% of households had free electricity.
Stats SA said although it is able to release provincial data, it cannot in terms of the Statistics Act release unit information — that of individual municipalities in this case — without their express permission.
”Municipalities do need to be protected by the Act because they may want to apply to certain organisations for grants, and poor performance figures could harm them, or there may arise situations where they face punitive measures from the ruling party in their areas,” Lehohla said.
Lehohla did, however, encourage municipalities to volunteer to have their individual performance figures published.
Stats SA said all 284 municipalities in the country participated in the census. — Sapa