SA certainly wasn't the first to build a desalination plant, and it appears to have been working as designed for quite a while now ("Water production to date (to end of June 2017) = approximately 138 billion litres" [1]).
I think the infamy was unearned, and mainly due to people not understanding that it was never intended to run all the time, but is insurance for a time of crisis (which we will certainly have again at some point).
