‘Scarily predictable’ — Joburg water crisis reaches boiling point as tyres burn and rubber bullets fly

“You could have been proactive … now that there’s a crisis — people have been shot, people have been injured — the mayor is coming out.”

This was the sentiment voiced by Westbury community member Evangelist Chester at a community meeting with Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero on Thursday, 11 September, after two days of tense protests and stand-offs with police over prolonged water shortages in the area.

Residents in the Joburg suburbs of Coronationville, Westbury, Newclare and Claremont have endured years of intermittent water supply, and for the last two weeks, some households have had no water supply.

Schools have to shut early because of a lack of water, elderly people queue with buckets at mosques, and on the streets, protesters manning blockades of burning tyres have been met with rubber bullets and tear gas.

Read more: Dry taps and empty promises — Joburg’s water crisis and the stench of political failure

“Why must we come to such situations before action is taken?” asked Chester.

City promises

At a community briefing on 11 September, Morero; the MMC for environment and infrastructure services, Jack Sekwaila; and Johannesburg Water’s managing director, Ntshavheni Mukwevho, said the Commando system, which supplies Westbury, Coronationville and surrounding suburbs, is under severe strain.

They confirmed that the city had allocated R800-million to refurbish reservoirs at Hursthill, Brixton and Crosby. However, refurbishment of the Brixton reservoir is only due for completion in October 2026.

In the meantime, 15 water tankers have been deployed, with more promised “if there’s a need”. Boreholes at schools and informal settlements are being considered.

“Now, what is of importance … is that we must have access to water,” said Morero. “Within that period of seven days or less, you will get a full supply.”

Why do these areas have an ongoing crisis?

Johannesburg Water has been throttling supply — reducing water flow and pressure rather than cutting it off completely — since November 2024 to stabilise reservoir levels.

“It is a controlled water supply management strategy … to ensure that water is distributed equitably and efficiently during periods of high demand and supply constraints,” said Nolwazi Dhlamini, Johannesburg Water’s spokesperson.

The idea is that throttling helps reservoirs recover faster, spreads water more fairly across the city, and reduces leaks and bursts. But the trade-off is that areas at higher elevations, like Coronationville and Westbury, often experience extremely low water pressure or no water at all.

For residents, the result is bewildering. “The surrounding areas have water, which we can’t understand. Why don’t we have water? It’s not right,” said 85-year-old Coronationville resident Susan Jacobie.

The civil society group WaterCAN argues that geography alone cannot explain the outages. “That’s a symptom of a broken system, not just geography,” said WaterCAN’s executive manager, Ferrial Adam.

She pointed to deeper infrastructure failures. The Hursthill 1 reservoir, which feeds much of the area, has been on bypass, meaning it was taken out of service and cannot send water through the system. More broadly, Johannesburg’s network was originally designed as a gravity-fed system, but without sufficient pumping capacity, high-lying suburbs are left vulnerable.

“We’ve also seen in places like Claremont that residents are told the same excuse: that they’re too high up to get supply,” said Adam. “But when we worked with an engineer and mapped the area, it became clear that’s not true. Neighbouring areas at even higher elevations do get water, which points to another issue: either valves not being properly managed or a blockage in the system. That needs urgent investigation.”

No quick solution

Mike Muller, adjunct professor at Wits University and former director-general of the Department of Water Affairs, said the challenges in these areas had been known for years, but delays in upgrading supply infrastructure meant that the works now under way would not provide relief this summer.

“The whole thing was scarily predictable, and even more scary is that there is no quick solution,” said Muller.

Speaking in a webinar last week, Muller used Westbury and Coronationville to illustrate why Johannesburg’s water problems cannot be solved with “simple single solutions”.

He explained that the shortages were not caused by empty dams but by bottlenecks in the city’s distribution system.

While the Vaal River Integrated System has enough water, limited pumping and storage capacity in municipal reservoirs prevent the water from reaching households. The problem has been compounded by infrastructure that has not kept pace with population growth in areas like Slovo Park, where thousands of new homes have been built without matching bulk supply upgrades.

Muller warned that Johannesburg Water may need to impose citywide water restrictions to share the available supply more equitably.

Other compounding issues include delayed maintenance, leaks and inadequate capacity at key points such as the Commando pumping station and delivery lines serving suburbs like Crosby and Coronationville.

Muller noted that any disruption — whether in pumping, pipelines or reservoirs — triggers low water pressure and intermittent supply, especially in higher areas.

Escalating tensions

A year ago, while covering water cut protests in Coronationville, I watched residents burn tyres after years of unreliable water supply. When I expressed concern about the health risks from the smoke, Councillor Melissa Davids remarked: “Well, can you imagine how desperate people are if they’re willing to do that?”

Read more: Coronationville residents take to the streets, fed up by persistent Johannesburg water outages

On Wednesday, those frustrations boiled over again. Residents blocked roads in Coronationville and Westbury with rocks, branches and burning tyres.

“It’s been five years,” said Coronationville resident Elaine Kerr of the intermittent supply. “Sometimes it’s on early in the morning, sometimes nothing at all. For the past two weeks, not a drop.”

Several times a day, she walks to a water tank provided by a local mosque, which installed a borehole in Coronationville, or wakes in the middle of the night, when the water is occasionally turned on, to fill buckets.

“It’s hard, it’s frustrating,” she said. “You’ll find the granny standing by her gate, calling the young boy, asking how much to go collect water.”

George Cowan (70) has lived in nearby Westbury since being forcibly removed from Fordsburg under apartheid. “The white people put us in here,” he said. He wasn’t protesting but was walking to the mosque to collect water from the borehole — only to find the taps dry.

His grandchildren’s schooling has been cut short because schools close early when there’s no running water, and they haven’t been able to bath in two days. “[The municipal authorities] don’t worry about us,” he said, frustrated that neighbouring areas have water.

Flashbang grenades

What began as a peaceful protest on Wednesday escalated when the police deployed flashbang grenades and fired rubber bullets to break up the blockades, injuring several people, including me, who was covering the protest as a journalist. Ironically, the protest was outside Rahima Moosa Mother and Child Hospital, where the injured were taken to the emergency department.

Read more: Police fire rubber bullets at residents and journalists in Joburg water protests

While being treated, I sat next to a Westbury resident whose hand was grazed by a rubber bullet. She told me she had been without a reliable water supply for more than three months — though, in reality, it’s been years. Her son, a Grade 6 learner at Bernard Isaacs Primary School, has been sent home early every day because of the outages.

“Every day at 10.30 we fetch our children. For three weeks, they’ve had only two hours of school,” she said. “Our houses are reeking of urine. We can’t flush. We pay for water, but we live like we’re in a squatter camp.”

Asked how it felt to be shot at, she said: “I felt violated. We were civil, with our hands up. If we didn’t do it peacefully, I would have understood. But water is a necessity for everyone.”

‘Regrettable’

On Thursday, at a community meeting, Mayor Morero said that he had discussed the police reaction to the protest with the police commissioner. “It is regrettable, of course, that some people got injured,” he said, adding that residents had the right to pursue cases and that the city would assist.

While my wound was being checked, a woman arrived with two young children, their faces streaked with tears after they were caught in tear gas. More residents streamed into the emergency department, prompting a triage line to be set up outside. When I left, tensions had escalated further, with rocks thrown at police and rubber bullets fired intermittently.

Navigating the blockades to my car took time, but residents helped me through. One Westbury mother — who has no water supply in her home — scrawled her phone number on my arm and begged me to let her know when I got home safely.

On Thursday morning, protests were ongoing and tensions were escalating, with rocks and rubber bullets flying. “Kids had to run for shelter on the way to school,” said one resident.

Ward 82 councillor Marilyn Smouse urged residents to remain united. “Just yesterday, I raised my hands in front of [the police] and still got pepper-sprayed. People got shot with bullets for just fighting for their basic human rights,” she said. “But we cannot also be out of order. If we do something, we must do it orderly,” she said, condemning looting and opportunistic action.

For WaterCAN’s Adam, the city’s response was inadequate. “Apologies don’t fill taps,” she said.

“We stand with the residents of Coronationville, Westbury, Westdene, Martindale and Sophiatown who took to the streets this week to demand what should never be denied: clean, reliable water.” DM