Over 11 days in the national water month of March, residents of Johannesburg were pushed to the edge by a water outage that cut across the city from Soweto in the south to Randpark Ridge in the north.
Residents were told the outage, which started on Sunday March 3, was caused by a power failure at one of Rand Water’s biggest pump stations, Eikenhof, as a result of a lightning strike. Eikenhof is powered by City Power, and did not have a backup system. This was followed two more power outages which then affected the levels of reservoirs fed by Eikenhof and managed by Johannesburg Water.
Some of these reservoirs — such as the Commando system — have been plagued by failures for far longer. Then 10 days into the crisis, it was revealed that a valve on a pipeline had been shut, which affected water flow from Rand Water to Joburg Water.
This water crisis did not start with the lightning strike or end with a closed valve. It has been more than 10 years in the making.
According to the Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s “Quality of Life” report in November 2022, water interruptions in Gauteng increased between 2017/2018 and 2020/2021. The report found that the main cause was ageing, inadequate or poorly maintained water infrastructure, vandalism and theft.
The 2023 “No Drop Report” from the national department of water & sanitation (DWS) highlights that Johannesburg loses 44% of its water supply through non-revenue water that includes stolen water, non-billable water and leaks. The leaks account for 25% of fresh drinking water that is being lost due to failing infrastructure.
The political and administrative aspects have had h a direct and indirect effects on our water sources. Political changes and battles, administrative inefficiencies and governance issues have weakened our water management and resulted in poor planning. For almost a decade, poor decisions related to water allocation, lack of infrastructure investment and maintenance, and inefficient policy implementation have shaped the current situation.
The city’s shaky coalition and several changes in mayoral leadership have resulted in poor service delivery in general. Some can argue that this instability extends to Rand Water and the DWS. The DWS has gone through significant positive change under the leadership of minister Senzo Mchunu, but it has a decade of poor governance to fix.
The failing infrastructure is a direct result of management failure at Joburg Water and the City of Johannesburg. The budget allocated to maintenance has consistently been inadequate. On paper, there appears to be sufficient spending that seems quite sensible, as city budgets show that Joburg Water spends 9%-10% of the value of water assets on maintenance. However, the repairs and maintenance budget allocates most of the money to personnel and only a tiny amount for inventory.
The city’s 2023/2024 budget doesn’t have a breakdown for Joburg Water, but shows the split on the city’s overall repairs and maintenance budget for this year: 58% on contractors, 31% on staff, just 3.4% on “inventory consumed” and the remaining 8% on “other”.
The city’s shaky coalition and several changes in mayoral leadership have resulted in poor service delivery in general. Some can argue that this instability extends to Rand Water and the DWS
Contractors are notoriously expensive. The city budgets show that Joburg Water brings in about 22% of the city’s revenue through water & sanitation services, and receives about 20% of the maintenance budget but only about 13% of the city’s capital expenditure budget (which covers both building new assets and renewal of existing assets).
This is clearly not working.
In addition, the management chaos has a direct impact on how the entities communicate with consumers. Instead of officials having open and transparent exchanges with residents and businesses, the public was either ignored or bombarded with PowerPoint technical jargon that alienated them, increased frustration and diminished levels of trust.
The different bodies involved — such as Rand Water, Joburg Water and the City of Johannesburg — are often caught up in finger pointing, and messaging tends to be fragmented and inconsistent, leaving residents confused and angry. This wasn’t helped by the absence from public view of mayor Kabelo Gwamanda for much of the crisis.
The lack of trust is compounded by authorities blaming high water usage and demand as a reason for the outages. This may be true and while we must all change our relationship with water, the reality is that poor planning has not taken into account population increase. Rand Water abstracts the same amount of water for a population that has grown from 12-million to 15.1-million people. The delay in the Lesotho Highlands Phase 2 project means Rand Water will not have more water until 2030.
The leaks in the Joburg Water infrastructure are a far greater problem. The water challenges we are experiencing in Johannesburg reach beyond the city boundaries and reverberate throughout the entire country. South Africa is a water-scarce country and the impact of climate change is only going to make things worse. The high water losses and pollution add stress to the failing system.
The Green Drop, Blue Drop and No Drop reports that were released by the DWS in December 2023, published after years of failure to produce them, revealed a distressing decline in municipalities’ ability to supply clean water to residents and treat wastewater effectively. The reports exposed the severity of the water crisis in the country, highlighting a disturbing trend of compromised water quality, with 46% of drinking systems not complying with microbiological standards, 67.6% of wastewater treatment works failing to clean raw sewage, industrial and pharmaceutical waste and 47.4% of water lost due to leaks or unaccounted for.
There is deep inequality of access to water in South Africa with lower income communities having less access than wealthier ones. Only 46% of people have a tap in their homes while millions depend on communal taps and as much as 10% of the population still depend on rivers, dams and streams for their water supplies (of which most are polluted). The result is that the rights of both people and ecosystems are being threatened.
We are at a critical juncture. This is not the beginning of the water woes in this country and neither is it the end. What we are seeing now will continue and could get worse if we do not act with urgency. The end of Johannesburg’s water woes will require a multifaceted approach focused on collaborative action, simplified messaging and a commitment to transparency.
In the short to medium term, the authorities must work together to provide a far better plan for infrastructure repair and upgrades, identifying and fixing leaks, ensuring an adequate budget for infrastructure maintenance, renewal and extension, addressing vandalism, and improving access to clean drinking water. It is an indication of the depths of the leadership crisis that such a plan does not already exist.
There must be an improvement in communication that can provide honest updates, explain challenges and share progress to foster dialogue. Given the load-shedding challenges, there need to be backup systems for emergencies. We have had years of power outages, so systems should be in place for this. As South Africa’s biggest city, Johannesburg should be leading the way in best-practice water systems.
WaterCAN, alongside other civil society groups, has taken proactive steps by establishing the Johannesburg Water Forum in collaboration with Joburg Water, Rand Water and the DWS. While this forum represents a crucial platform for dialogue and co-operation, challenges persist.
It is only through collective efforts by civil society, government, and other stakeholders that we can overcome water challenges in Johannesburg and South Africa. As ordinary people, we must keep putting pressure on the government and we need to stand up and fight back against mismanagement and corruption.
• Adam is executive manager of WaterCAN
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