--- title: "‘Are we not important enough?’ — Joburg residents protest water cuts before elections" description: "Across Joburg, water distribution networks remain critically strained under the weight of decaying infrastructure, bulk restrictions from Rand Water, and chronic municipal management failures, causing residents in Kensington, Parktown, Melville, and Lenasia to take to the streets." type: "NewsArticle" publisher: "Daily Maverick" site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za" section: "NO WATER" authors: - name: "Sikelelekile Pahlana" url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/sikelelekile-phahlana/" - name: "Jamie Ho" url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/jamie-ho/" canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-30-are-we-not-important-enough-joburg-residents-protest-water-cuts-before-elections/" published: "2026-10-30T19:00:57" updated: "2026-10-30T19:07:12" lang: "en-ZA" word_count: 1899 --- # ‘Are we not important enough?’ — Joburg residents protest water cuts before elections > Across Joburg, water distribution networks remain critically strained under the weight of decaying infrastructure, bulk restrictions from Rand Water, and chronic municipal management failures, causing residents in Kensington, Parktown, Melville, and Lenasia to take to the streets. By Jamie Ho and Sikelelekile Pahlana · Published 30 October 2026, 21:00 SAST · Updated 30 October 2026, 21:07 SAST ## Key points - Johannesburg’s water crisis is worsening, with dry taps, burst pipes and unreliable supply disrupting homes and businesses just days before elections. - Residents in Kensington, Parktown, Melville, Lenasia and elsewhere have taken to the streets, some after enduring outages lasting weeks or months. - Experts blame ageing infrastructure, reservoir failures, municipal mismanagement and Rand Water restrictions — with up to 35% of treated water lost through leaks. - The crisis is hitting elderly and medically vulnerable residents hardest, while civil society prepares a major protest at Joburg Water’s Newtown headquarters. ## Content On Thursday, 29 October, frustrated residents in Kensington, Johannesburg, protested at the intersection of Queen Street and Albertina Sisulu Road. Among them was 66-year-old Neil Holland, who has operated a hairdressing salon in the area for the past seven years. “You need water to wash hair. You need water to rinse colour out of hair,” Holland explained. “Running a hairdressing business is disastrous because you need water.” Since the water stopped, Holland has watched his business suffer, with frustrated customers turned away and revenue plummeting. ![water outages-jamie- sike](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/5caOimKt44cR3RJ_vMaiVsRWY0s=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/IMG_2360_461435.jpg) *After a week without water, hairdresser Neil Holland protested water outages with other residents on the corner of Queen Street and Albertina Sisulu Road. (Photo: Jamie Ho)* What’s most disturbing to Holland are the streams of clean water running down the streets while taps run dry. “It comes from burst pipes that are not being taken care of for days and weeks,” he said. Water shortages in Joburg’s eastern suburbs can be traced to the Alexander Park Reservoir. The facility supplies 12 suburbs, including Kensington, Bez Valley and Malvern, but has remained on bypass for months due to postponed repairs despite funds previously earmarked for its maintenance. Running on bypass takes the reservoir’s storage buffer offline, leaving the local grid running directly off incoming bulk mains. When Rand Water restricts bulk supply, there is no stored pressure left to push water uphill into higher-lying streets. “Alexander Park Reservoir is on the Palmiet system – it runs past this place,” independent water and sanitation expert Richard Holden explained. “And there’s not enough pressure in that system to push water into the Alexander Park reservoir. Simple as that.” ![water outage in Dawnview, Primrose](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/siL8j5StyIqPf8aWl0r_TiWWLIc=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/wateroutages-jamie-sike4_511662.jpg) *At the intersection of Queen Street and Albertina Sisulu in Kensington at sunset, protestors wave placards highlighting their anger at prolonged water outages. (Photo: Jamie Ho)* “We just want our basic rights, which is water,” Holland pleaded. “That’s what we want. We don’t want anything that is unachievable or something that is beyond. We just want the basic necessities to get on with our day and just live a normal human life.” Wilhelmina Martin (53) lives in Dawnville, where the community has faced a prolonged outage. She suffers from multiple sclerosis and myasthenia gravis, conditions that severely impact her vision and mobility. This makes navigating an environment without water extremely challenging. “I really can’t do much. So it’s intense for me to be carrying anything or lifting,” she said. “So my husband does most of the work. \[He\] is 63 with a full-time job, and he comes home at night and tries to fill as many of the buckets and stuff for the bathrooms.” “The more I stress, the more it affects my ability to do things,” she explained. “So I have to stay calm. How do you stay calm after more than 50 days without water?” [Read more Joburg power, water outages put medically vulnerable residents at risk October 24, 2026 ![Image](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/elaaVwuQLzzbl2p1ngzbyCYGZ7U=/450x0/smart/file/attachments/orphans/OCN-medically-vulnerable15_893397.jpg)](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-24-joburg-power-water-outages-put-medically-vulnerable-residents-at-risk/) Martin begged for government intervention. “Is this not part of our human rights? Are we not important enough? What do we have to do to deserve to get water?” ### **A surge of protests** The protest in Kensington was one of many that have cropped up across Johannesburg in response to persistent water outages and failing city infrastructure. This week alone, residents of Lenasia, Melville and Parktown have taken to the streets to demand restoration timelines and urgent repairs to distribution networks. In Parktown, this anger was on full display on Friday, 30 October, when residents and supportive citizens gathered on Jan Smuts Avenue between Loch Avenue and Seymour Road with the same demands as Kensington: bring back water and hold failing systems accountable. [Read more Four days, four protests — Desperate Joburg residents hit the streets over water cuts October 27, 2026 ![Image](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/U-WxqZG940sq-KLW7CHzyXZn3zM=/450x0/smart/file/attachments/orphans/StGiles-Anna3_152540.jpg)](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-27-four-days-four-protests-desperate-joburg-residents-hit-the-streets-over-water-cuts/) Sharol Stevens has been a resident in Parktown for almost 50 years and has attended three water outage protests this week, from one in Brixton last Saturday to one in Melville on Wednesday, and Kensington’s protest on Thursday. “In 120 years, this is the worst crisis Parktown West has had with water,” she said. “In February this year, we stood at the same spot and we thought after 20 days, we made news right to the \[State of the Nation Address\], and that there was a whole sort of change around, we believed that we would get water.” In February, a multi-system failure left large parts of Johannesburg [without water](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-02-06-nobody-cares-rage-joburg-residents-as-water-outages-worsen/). “Now we’re standing for 210 days since February, and here we are sitting and we have totally unreliable water,” Stevens said. “We have weeks \[with\] zero water and then we can have water at night, and at ridiculous hours like midnight till three/four in the morning and then it varies, especially the higher-lying areas.” Highlighting the irregular and unreliable water flow, Stevens emphasised how there has been no effective communication from Joburg Water. ![water outages-jamie- sike](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/GL6yL1diHL8tJSkl8CgI-q8Dphw=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/IMG_2153_668516.jpeg) *A woman holds a placard at a protest over water cuts in Parktown. (Photo: Sikelelekile Pahlana)* “I recently had a metre installed on the pipes,” she explained. “Joburg Water did that to measure how much water we really get and they saw there was zero water coming through. That was during the period that we got zero water. But we’ve had no feedback on that.” These mounting frustrations are set to culminate on Monday, 2 November, in a unified demonstration to demand immediate accountability, water relief and urgent intervention for the city’s crumbling water infrastructure. “As civil society, we’re actually en masse going out on the 2nd, to Joburg Water’s headquarters in Newtown, where we will actually just be visible and audible in a situation that is untenable,” said Stevens. ### Impact on the elderly Nomsa Daela, a citizen science and training coordinator from WaterCAN, emphasised how the severity of water outages has a disproportionate impact on elderly people. “They can’t go or can’t afford water because they depend on the Sassa grant. We also have some old people that need to go and stand in the line when there’s water tankers to collect water. And they can’t do that, they can’t even carry a 20-litre bucket.” “Now, what they do is they pay people with their Sassa grant to go and collect water for them. So that is not access to water. We know that the infrastructure is failing, but they should make alternative means for people to get water.” Daela added: “So this protest here, I think it’s about people saying enough is enough, because now they’ve been having these water challenges for a long time now. It doesn’t start now, it’s been since February people have been struggling with water.” Daela also criticised Joburg Water for failing to warn residents in advance about brief supply windows. “Your water will be open for two hours and what Joburg Water does is they don’t communicate with people that we’re going to open the water for two hours... Now people have to leave the comfort of their own home to go and buy.” [Read more Joburg power, water outages put medically vulnerable residents at risk October 24, 2026 ![Image](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/elaaVwuQLzzbl2p1ngzbyCYGZ7U=/450x0/smart/file/attachments/orphans/OCN-medically-vulnerable15_893397.jpg)](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-24-joburg-power-water-outages-put-medically-vulnerable-residents-at-risk/) ### Broken system The dry taps occurring across Johannesburg point to a larger issue regarding the City’s broken reticulation system. According to water expert Holden, the Vaal Dam has ample capacity but the City’s system loses water due to ageing infrastructure and damaged pipes. Holden explained that around 30%-35% of the treated water entering Johannesburg simply leaks into the ground through degraded municipal reticulation pipes and leaking reservoirs. “What people forget is pipes get old, they get aged, and they need to be replaced,” he explains. “In Sandton, Randburg and Bedfordview, the pipes are made from a material from the early 1940s called asbestos-cement pipes. Those pipes have a far shorter lifespan than steel pipes. So when those pipes fail, they explode.” ![water outage in Dawnview, Primrose](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/4EwkCRTxmpTHxEOe6JafiaGAHwg=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/wateroutages-jamie-sike1_230024.jpg) *A protest on the corner of Queen Street and Albertina Sisulu Road in Kensington where protesters voiced their frustrations about week-long water outages. (Photo: Jamie Ho)* Gauteng metros lose approximately one billion litres of clean, potable water every day to pipe bursts and distribution leaks. This amounts to roughly 431 billion litres lost per year before it ever reaches a resident’s tap. To bridge this water loss, Rand Water sends more water out than it needs, pushing far more water into the system than residents actually consume. But running at maximum capacity pushes bulk pumps and reservoirs to breaking point. To prevent its storage from collapsing entirely and keeping within its abstraction limits, the utility is forced to throttle the flow. This triggers several problems. Holden pointed out: “The problem at the moment is that Rand Water cannot physically pump any more water through the system.” He noted that Johannesburg was “built directly on top of a continental divide, making supply geographically difficult”. Because gravity cannot be relied upon to move water across the city, the system’s layout is inherently fragile because “you need all the pump stations working”. [Read more Foul water scares hit Joburg suburbs — councillors blame ‘cowboy’ contractors October 22, 2026 ![Image](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/nljT3KrGioTsajgWKWJjz9Xr-e8=/450x0/smart/file/attachments/orphans/anna-Bez-water2_454364.jpg)](https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2026-10-22-foul-water-scares-hit-joburg-suburbs-councillors-blame-cowboy-contractors/) ### **Throttling and ‘water hammer’** Next is the problem of intermittent throttling, which accelerates the destruction of the city’s pipes. When the city shuts off the supply, the pipes drain and fill with air. When the water is switched back on, it rushes through and slams into that trapped air, creating violent pressure shocks. “That’s called water hammer,” Holden explained. “And we call it hammer for a good reason, because it’s like a pressure wave, and that’s knocking on your pipe. And a pipe which is very weak can then break.” Rand Water has been throttling residents' water persistently over the past few weeks. While residents have been cautioned to restrict their water usage, rising temperatures have resulted in increased demand. ![water outage in Dawnview, Primrose](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/ATg95VDCvbCMvmZCly2Gew0PAiE=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/wateroutages-jamie-sike10_631393.jpg) *Six days before local government elections, frustrated residents protest against prolonged water outages on the corner of Queen Street and Albertina Sisulu Road. (Photo: Jamie Ho)* “With a heat wave, people use more water,” Water Crisis Committee leader Ravin Singh explained. “They shower more often, they water the gardens more often, they drink more water. All of that is impacting us. So, while some people are very deliberate about how they use water, there are others who are not the same way." This surge of demand has put further strain on already frail water systems. Holden cautions that the only way to mitigate the issue is to use less water and minimise pressure on the system. “The only way to spread the pain is for everyone in Joburg to reduce their consumption,” Singh said. “And not just Joburg: in Tshwane, in Midrand, in Ekurhuleni. Everyone. ![water outage in Dawnview, Primrose](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/ueHvuKaIRXea7iJgWK5g48jyFaA=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/attachments/orphans/wateroutages-jamie-sike7_722495.jpg) *Co-convener of the Water Crisis Committee Ravin Singh highlights the institutional failures of the current water crisis affecting Johannesburg. (Photo: Jamie Ho)* “Everyone on the Rand Water system must reduce their consumption. And that’s the only way they can balance the system.” Johannesburg Water has recognised the constraints on its water supply system and has stated that urgent interventions such as throttling, leak detection and pipe repairs are being implemented to reduce pressure on systems. It has also called for targeted reductions in high-consumption areas. Johannesburg Water did not reply to Daily Maverick’s request for comment at the time of writing. **DM** *Daily Maverick’s Joburg Bureau is for people who love this city. Get the latest Joburg news, events and conversations sent straight to your phone every Friday.*[*Join the WhatsApp Community.*](https://chat.whatsapp.com/CLvZV3KX5vDGXuZo0DBP39?utm_campaign=Post-3044&utm_medium=email&utm_source=joburg)