Invalid R263m tanker tender rolls on as Joburg’s taps run dry

Johannesburg residents no longer look to their taps to provide water. For many, that critical lifeline now comes from water tankers rumbling through the streets.

“Tanker use has become normalised. In many areas, it is no longer emergency relief. It is routine,” civil society group WaterCAN’s executive director, Dr Ferrial Adam, told amaBhungane.

While some residents shell out for private tankers that charge up to R1/litre – versus R30 for 1,000 litres of municipal water – others are left to chase the City’s tankers through the suburbs, hoping that by the time they find one it hasn’t run out of water.

But the City’s tanker contracts are now in jeopardy after the Johannesburg High Court declared them “invalid”.

The contract – estimated to be worth R263-million – was awarded in 2024 to two little-known but seemingly connected companies: Builtpro Construction, run by Emmanuel Sserufusa (then 27), and Nutinox, run by Sibuyile Magingxa (then 29). The two companies were contracted to supply 70 water tankers to the City of Johannesburg for a three-year period.

However, in December 2025, just one year into the contract, the court accepted a rival bidder’s argument that the tender had lapsed before it was awarded, making the contracts with Builtpro and Nutinox invalid.

During the court case, Johannesburg Water refused to disclose how much it had already paid to the two companies. “The agreements and the terms on which they were concluded as well as the payments made to Builtpro and Nutinox, thus remain shrouded in mystery,” Judge Evette Dippenaar wrote in her judgment.

The court agreed to suspend the order for five months to give the City time to put another contract in place. But Johannesburg Water and Nutinox applied for leave to approach the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) to have the ruling overturned, suspending the judgment in its entirety.

And while the appeal process continues, the same companies will keep supplying tankers to the City, leaving communities dependent on a system the high court has already ruled legally invalid.

Read more: Water tanker cadres keep cashing in on R223m Joburg contract despite court action

The rival bidder

In 2023, LTC Holding was awarded a contract to supply tankers to Johannesburg Water. The budget was modest: R43-million and it would be shared with another company, but it was a foot in the door.

When the big one – a three-year contract to supply 70 tankers across the City, potentially worth R263-million – was advertised in July 2023, LTC submitted a bid as well.

The initial tender submission deadline was the end of August 2023, but was pushed back to 7 September. The bid would only be valid for 90 days, but by December, Johannesburg Water wasn’t ready to award the contract and asked bidders for an extension until February 2024, then another until April, and finally until May. By that time, 40 out of 92 bidders had lost interest and dropped out.

Although LTC was given a new month-to-month contract, it was kept in the dark about the fate of the main tender. In desperation, it filed a Promotion of Access to Information Act (Paia) request in June 2024, which is how it discovered that Builtpro and Nutinox had been awarded the tender.

It had taken 241 days to award the tender.

But instead of implementing the contract, Johannesburg Water asked LTC to keep supplying tankers. It was only in November 2024, six months after the contract was awarded, that Builtpro and Nutinox started delivering.

Against this background, LTC approached the Johannesburg High Court in November 2024 and argued that the bids were only valid for 90 days, and that Johannesburg Water broke the rules by asking for a string of extensions.

“The mere fact that [Johannesburg Water] extended the validity period for so many days in itself constitutes an irregularity. Where the tender document stipulated a tender validity period of 90 days, [Johannesburg Water] attempted to extend the validity period to a startling 241 days,” LTC’s director, David Lesito, said in his affidavit.

Red flags for collusion

When amaBhungane looked at the tender that had been awarded to Builtpro and Nutinox, we were suspicious as well.

Builtpro listed its address as an office park in Illovo, while Nutinox claimed to operate from Midrand’s Waterfall Estate. These addresses had helped the companies to score extra points as Johannesburg Water scored the bids using a 90/10 points system, which allocated 90 points for price and 10 points for other criteria: six points for being located in Johannesburg, two points for being in Gauteng and only two points for being a black-owned business with a turnover of less than R10-million.

But when amaBhungane went to both addresses, we found no sign of thriving water tanker businesses.

Read more: Joburg awards R263m water tanker tender to two twentysomethings

Our research showed that until April 2023, Builtpro and Nutinox – two supposedly independent bidders – had listed that same bogus address in Waterfall Estate. A company profile, which was provided to us after the story was published, showed that the two youngsters, Sserufusa of Builtpro and Magingxa of Nutinox, were also business partners in another company.

Tender maths

Documents filed in LTC’s court case showed that the tender had also been scored in a creative way.

At R2,502 and R2,525 respectively, Builtpro and Nutinox look far cheaper than LTC bid price of R3,563.

These figures, however, are a mishmash of normal rates (rands per kilolitre) and emergency rates (rands per hour) over three years, which were clumsily added together to form a single figure that the bidders were judged on.

Pull the figures apart though and Builtpro’s R80/kilolitre puts it in eighth place out of 12 bidders, while Nutinox’s R81.20/kilolitre puts it in ninth, far behind LTC’s R75/kilolitre.

According to Johannesburg Water, these normal rates were expected to make up 90% of the contract, with another 10% dedicated to emergency deliveries to places that had been without water for 24 hours.

And this is where Builtpro and Nutinox had the most competitive rates. (Builtpro and Nutinox will charge R300/hour, versus LTC’s R400/hour.)

The effect of the tender’s creative maths is that companies with low emergency rates – like Builtpro and Nutinox – were catapulted into first position, even though at the time emergency deliveries were expected to make up just 10% of the contract.

Johannesburg Water’s silence

On 22 February 2025, two months after we published our investigation, Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero announced that the City would investigate the R263-million Johannesburg Water tanker tender.

In April 2025, we reached out to the City requesting an update. We were met with silence. Last month, we reached out again and, despite multiple attempts, we have received no response.

The questions that we had put to the City were innocuous: what is the current status of the investigation? Has any preliminary progress been made? Could they share any details on how the investigation was constituted? Was there a timeline to conclude the investigation? In other words, questions that the City should have been able to answer, even without a final verdict.

But a year later, the City remains mum, and Builtpro and Nutinox tankers are still running while the water crisis worsens.

State of the water crisis

At this year’s State of the Nation Address, two ministers were notably absent: water minister Pemmy Majodina and co-operative governance minister Velenkosini Hlabisa. The water crisis had become so severe that President Cyril Ramaphosa had reportedly ordered both to stay put and sort out the water crisis.

Water shedding is nothing new in Johannesburg, but in the past six months it has escalated from mere operational failures into an acute governance and service delivery emergency, WaterCAN’s Adam argues.

“Outages commonly last multiple days, often with little or no notice. In more severe cases, residents report disruptions extending into weeks, and in some areas even months, particularly where broader system failures cascade across the network. For example, Selby has reportedly been without water for six months,” she told us.

Over the past month, Melville, Brixton, Parktown West and Emmarentia have run dry as well, leading to unlikely scenes of protests in the suburbs.

In an attempt to placate angry residents, Majodina, Morero and Gauteng Premier Panyaza Lesufi, held a media briefing last week. But instead of reassuring residents that the crisis was in hand, Lesufi’s comment about renting a hotel room to take a shower only made the situation worse.

“[B]reakdowns and losses are outpacing repairs,” Adam said. “A key indicator is system inefficiency: in Johannesburg, water losses linked to infrastructure failure are estimated at roughly 35%, based on the 2023 Blue Drop findings — and WaterCAN believes the situation has likely deteriorated since then.”

Looking ahead, WaterCAN does not foresee any short-term fix: huge maintenance is required to fix the system, but the budget for maintenance is being gobbled up by stop-gap measures, such as water tankers. And much like the load shedding crisis, it may not get better without first getting much worse.

Cancelling in a crisis

The question facing Judge Dippenaar in December was: how do you cancel a contract for water tankers in the middle of a water crisis?

“There is an important issue which requires consideration, namely the continuity of services to the communities served by [Johannesburg Water]. The water issues experienced by consumers are well documented,” she said, adding that “the tender concerned important services which should not be interrupted”.

The compromise she came up with was that the court would declare the tender constitutionally invalid but would suspend the order for five months, giving Johannesburg Water enough time to complete a new tender process.

“History has proved that the 90-day bid period was insufficient,” Dippenaar, taking a sly stab at the 241 days it took to award the tender in the first place. “It would ultimately leave vulnerable recipients of the potable water service at risk if an unrealistic period for completion of the tender process is set.”

The problem is that companies, municipalities and government departments know that in a crisis they can hold the law to ransom. And one does not need to look far to see how the situation in Johannesburg could play out.

The Tshwane tanker tender

In 2022, the City of Tshwane awarded a R2-billion tender to refill stationary water tankers in informal settlements in the city.

Aptitude Trading Enterprise was one of the unsuccessful bidders and approached the Pretoria High Court to have the tender declared invalid. In November 2022, that court granted the order and gave the City of Tshwane three months, 90 days, to conclude a new tender process.

On 23 February 2023, five days before the deadline, the City of Tshwane approached the court on an urgent basis seeking an extension until 31 May 2023. The court agreed, but by 31 May the City still wasn’t ready and asked for another extension until 31 August, and then another until 30 November.

The case was eventually resolved at the SCA in May 2025, nearly two years after the case was launched.

In the judgment, the SCA wrote that the municipality had “dragged its feet in implementing the order of [the court] and always sought an extension of the suspension order at a very late stage just before its expiry”.

“Such conduct should not be countenanced. It is an abuse of the court processes,” the SCA said.

Nutinox appeals

Johannesburg is now facing a similar process.

Following the high court judgment, Johannesburg Water and Nutinox applied for leave to appeal to the SCA. An appeal suspends the high court judgment, and means that the current tender keeps on running even though the court concluded that the tender should be set aside and a new tender be awarded.

Both Johannesburg Water and Nutinox argue that the tender was validly awarded within the bid validity period. In a written response to our questions, Nutinox director Sibuyile Magingxa said: “It is […] important to emphasise that the case does not concern any impropriety on the part of Nutinox, but rather relates to the interpretation of the [supply chain management] policy and its applicability.”

The outcome of the SCA will determine whether the tender was rightfully awarded or whether Johannesburg Water needs to start from scratch.

Under Dippenaar’s judgment, Builtpro and Nutinox would still receive half the contract – the 13 months before the court ruled that the contract was invalid, and another five months for the tender to be re-awarded.

With the appeal working its way slowly through the SCA even if the two companies lose, they could get the full three years of the original contract.

Unknown millions

How much Builtpro and Nutinox have been paid remains a closely guarded secret: R263-million was the estimated value of the three-year contract, but that was based on previous demand for tankers. In the midst of a full-blown water emergency, the value is likely to be much higher.

But Johannesburg Water may soon be getting out of the water tanker tender business.

In November 2025, Morero announced that Johannesburg Water had bought 20 new water tankers.

Tellingly, Morero told journalists: “This strategic step is intended to navigate around the challenges posed by costly and often questionable tender procedures for purchasing water tankers.”

AmaBhungane could find no trace of a tender for these tankers. WaterCAN told us that it has heard that the City is trying to procure another 60 water tankers. At roughly R2.5-million each, this would put the total bill at R200-million.

We reached out to Johannesburg Water last month to ask how many water tankers have been purchased, which areas would be serviced, and whether a tender had been issued.

Initially, Johannesburg Water told us: “We are engaging the relevant stakeholders, including a review of the draft responses with the City Manager’s Office and the City of Johannesburg’s Group Legal & Governance.”

Despite several follow-ups, Johannesburg Water is yet to respond to us.

With 80 tankers, Johannesburg would have enough tankers to replace Builtpro and Nutinox and get out of the tanker tender business once and for all. But for now at least, Johannesburg Water seems willing to fight tooth and nail to ensure that the controversial R263-million water tanker tender stays in place. DM