Mayor, bomb squad go AWOL as hundreds of thousands of Joburg households go without water – again

Water outages again hit armies of people in Johannesburg from north to south and west to east as a Rand Water-scheduled maintenance plan hit the hard realities of deadbeat infrastructure. 

But neither Dada Morero nor his MMC for infrastructure, Jack Sekwaila, were anywhere to be seen; nor was the city’s bomb squad appointed to deal with service delivery crises. Not even President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Swat team for Joburg, appointed in March, led from the front. 

Instead, crisis management was left to councillors, who were run ragged, and to the communications and marketing staff of Rand Water and its municipal counterpart, Johannesburg Water.

There are still two weeks to go for the winter maintenance, although Rand Water said six of the eight-part maintenance plan was complete and that all its systems were pumping. This doesn’t mean there’s water in taps as its mega-systems take days to recover and to fill municipal reservoirs. Water cuts are not like load-shedding, where the lights immediately come back on when the switch is flipped to green.

Rand Water is the bulk supplier, while Johannesburg Water is the city’s troubled utility, which already suffers legacy negligence, so one in two reservoirs has leaks. This means recovery takes even longer than anticipated. 

Vandals also laid waste to a major Rand Water pipeline at the weekend, setting recovery back and causing an extended weekend of grief for residents. While the city said two tankers would be supplied to all affected wards, that didn’t happen.

“The final phase of Rand Water’s maintenance that will affect Johannesburg is scheduled for 15-18 July 2025. This phase will again impact the Sandton, Midrand, Linksfield and South Hills systems,” said Johannesburg Water.

“We are working closely with Rand Water to mitigate potential disruptions with lessons learned from the current phase.”

The utility added that: “The entire city is not affected by this phase of the maintenance. Most Johannesburg systems have recovered, except for areas in the south of Johannesburg and parts of the inner city, which are still experiencing supply challenges.” The city expects full recovery in the next 24 to 48 hours (as at Sunday, 6 July at 6pm), provided no further setbacks occur.

On the ground

The inner city, specifically the high-density areas of Hillbrow, Yeoville and Berea, was among the worst affected. At the weekend, people used hand-made trolleys to pull buckets of water they collected mostly from springs and from a hole near the Yeoville reservoir. They had to lug heavy water containers up to the high-rises.

At the reservoir, women did their washing on the street while there was a traffic jam as people collected water from the “well” in the ground. Near Tudhope Street, a community used a spring to collect water in buckets, some loading them on to a bakkie. They would not allow photographs because raids on immigrants by paramilitary organisations such as Operation Dudula are growing, as Lerato Mutsila reported. The area is home to people from across the rest of Africa, although some locals live there, like Doreen Ntuli and her daughter, who were pulling buckets of water that councillor David Modupi had arranged for them. 

Modupi was driving around trying to get water tankers to the area. “The situation’s not good at all. We’ve not seen the two tankers per ward. I’m sure they (Johannesburg Water) are throttling, too,” he said. The city has implemented water throttling in areas where payments are low and illegal connections high – this means water is reduced to a trickle, or there is no water at night. 

If you implement maintenance cuts and add throttling, the system grinds to a halt, leaving taps dry. Ntuli said she had been without water for seven days by Sunday afternoon, 6 July.

“They (Johannesburg Water) have not catered to elders,” said Modupi, who introduced Daily Maverick to Octavia Mtshali, who wore a T-shirt with former President Jacob Zuma’s image.

Her buckets had been stolen when she entrusted them to youngsters to fetch water from a tanker. Ntuli was sharing her haul with the old neighbour. Modupi said he and another councillor for a water-stressed area had protested at a council meeting last week. He said they had objected to councillors getting bottled water and having a water tanker stationed outside Constance Bapela chamber in Braamfontein while areas suffered without water. 

 Residents in the dry and in the dark 

“Joburg Water remains silent, and residents’ taps dry,” said the DA’s Johannesburg spokesperson for infrastructure, Tyrell Meyer. “Rand Water’s maintenance impacts multiple high-demand systems including Commando, Orlando East and West, Soweto, Brixton, Crosby, Hursthill 1 and 2, Northcliff, Crown Gardens, and various central and high-lying suburbs – dry taps stemming from these outages ought to be communicated by Joburg Water, but there has been radio silence on the matter. 

“We reject the careless manner in which residents have been kept in the dark. Clear proactive communication would have allowed communities to prepare adequately for a complete water outage, not just a 50% supply reduction (as previously stated),” said Meyer. He said the provision of water tankers was helter-skelter and some areas saw tanks arriving at 10pm. (When Joburg temperatures drop to low single digits).

The map of outages covers a range of between 20 and 40km; it exceeds a February 2025 system failure, which Morero said had affected 60% of the city’s water system. 

Morero’s spokesperson referred Daily Maverick to Johannesburg Water. The head of the bomb squad, Snuki Zikalala, did not respond to requests for comment. 

WhatsApp groups and active citizens step up 

In the radio silence from authorities, Johannesburg’s active citizens stepped into the crisis. The Johannesburg Water Crisis Committee and WaterCan (the community action network run by Dr Ferrial Adam) protested at Johannesburg Water on Saturday. “The bomb squad has gone into a bomb shelter, it seems,” said Adam, who said that tankers had been thin on the ground and communication unclear.

She said council information showed that infrastructure investment had been under-funded in the latest budget, but that she remained buoyant about plans on the table by the Presidential Working Group team to structure a solid plan to improve water provision. The Rand Water maintenance is part of that planning.

WhatsApp groups with reach across all communities pinned locations and shared information on where to find water; they also liaised with Johannesburg Water and did their best to support vulnerable people.

This is the fifth time over two years that water cuts that have hit Johannesburg have been so extensive that Daily Maverick has characterised them as near Day Zero conditions – the term refers to taps running dry at a scale that can be called Day Zero. The term was coined by a Cape Town team working for the council as they ramped up efforts in 2018 to ward off severe water cuts threatening the city. DM