For most of its 60 years of op­er­a­tion, the Wa­ter and Sew­er­age Au­thor­i­ty (WASA) has failed to pro­vide a 24/7 sup­ply of potable wa­ter to its pri­vate and com­mer­cial cus­tomers.

In­stead, it has been a drain on the pub­lic purse, nev­er able to achieve op­er­a­tional ef­fi­cien­cy and con­sis­tent­ly falling well be­low in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards for the pro­vi­sion of wa­ter and waste­water ser­vices.

The ma­jor­i­ty of com­mu­ni­ties across the coun­try re­ceive a sup­ply of pipe-borne wa­ter a few days — and in some cas­es a few hours — in any giv­en week.

House­holds with­out wa­ter tanks and bar­rels are par­tic­u­lar­ly chal­lenged, so when short­ages of that es­sen­tial com­mod­i­ty go from bad to se­vere, as is of­ten the case, an­gry protests erupt. On those oc­ca­sions, com­mu­ni­ty fury is di­rect­ed at WASA’s man­age­ment, as well as the gov­ern­ment of the day.

There is no dis­pute that it is one of the most in­ef­fi­cient and rev­enue-drain­ing of the state en­ti­ties in the coun­try, and it doesn’t help that it has al­so been a fre­quent­ly used po­lit­i­cal tool over the years.

So there will be a great deal of in­ter­est in how Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar and her Cab­i­net deal with the oner­ous bur­den that is WASA.

There have been sev­er­al at­tempts over the years, at a cost of bil­lions of tax­pay­er dol­lars, to re­struc­ture and trans­form WASA, with lit­tle to show.

The most re­cent, which was still be­ing im­ple­ment­ed at the time of the April 28 Gen­er­al Elec­tion, in­clud­ed a plan to re­move hun­dreds of man­agers and re­place them with 34 se­nior pro­fes­sion­als.

Now that it has been scrapped, the new Gov­ern­ment can’t af­ford to waste much time com­ing up with a new plan for the trans­for­ma­tion of WASA be­cause there can’t be a re­turn to the old op­er­at­ing sys­tem.

If, as Per­sad-Bisses­sar de­scribed it, that plan was in­tend­ed to “bru­talise” and “de­monise” WASA’s work­ers, her ad­min­is­tra­tion will have to work out the com­plex­i­ties of re­vi­tal­is­ing that pub­lic util­i­ty while main­tain­ing cur­rent staff lev­els.

It is hard to fath­om any po­lit­i­cal­ly ex­pe­di­ent so­lu­tions to the WASA dilem­ma. Cos­met­ic changes won’t work for a loss-mak­ing, over­staffed en­ti­ty that has been sub­sidised to the tune of al­most $2 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly un­der suc­ces­sive po­lit­i­cal regimes.

WASA’s fi­nan­cial per­for­mance is so dire that the rev­enue it gets from wa­ter rates cov­ers on­ly a frac­tion of its op­er­at­ing costs and af­ter decades of mis­man­age­ment, lack of ac­count­abil­i­ty and cor­rup­tion, there is no room for busi­ness as usu­al.

As much as Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar has made a pub­lic show of rip­ping up and dis­card­ing the 135-page re­port com­mis­sioned by the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment, which found WASA to be an un­wieldy, over­staffed, un­pro­duc­tive, and un­re­spon­sive en­ti­ty that is no longer ef­fi­cient­ly serv­ing cit­i­zens, her ad­min­is­tra­tion must quick­ly come up with a vi­able al­ter­nate plan.

Cli­mate change and the coun­try’s de­plet­ed rev­enue po­si­tion make that a Her­culean task.

How­ev­er, that won’t mat­ter to the thou­sands of frus­trat­ed WASA cus­tomers across the coun­try.

All that mat­ters to them, af­ter many years of un­kept promis­es of wa­ter for all, is a steady sup­ply of clean wa­ter flow­ing from their taps.