Johannesburg has been plagued by intermittent and non-existent water supplies for years. Every year, it’s been getting worse and the serious problems reach more areas.
Suburbs like Emmarentia simply did not have water supply at night. Then the outages started lasting into the days too, for days at a time.
In the recent water protests in Coronationville and Westbury, people had had enough. They, like all high-lying Johannesburg suburbs, have been the worst affected.
Broken systems like the Commando one have meant years of interrupted water supply. People took to the streets in frustration, demanding water in their taps, and not just in an emergency supply from the back of a water tanker truck.
The sad reality, though, is that there’s very little that can be done to supply water quickly. Just as Joburg’s water supply system has taken years to collapse, so its restoration will take months at best and years in some areas.
Lives affected
I saw one of the most affecting impacts of this when I went to the industrial area of Selby. There, businesses and factories have suffered from irregular supply for two years. The pipeline is old and has not been upgraded, and the area is rife with illegal connections.
Contractors are working to fix the pipes, but they are rotten and businesses often cannot operate as they don’t have water. Four thousand people who work at those businesses are either faced with losing their jobs entirely or have been put on shortened hours because the factories cannot afford to keep paying them when they cannot operate.
Read more: Joburg water crisis disrupts schools, imperils health, fuels crime, say protesters
This is one of the clearest examples of the city’s failures leading directly to the destruction of people’s lives. DA councillors are maintaining the pressure to try to ensure the repairs are carried out and that water tankers deliver regularly.
Some areas of the city are worse than others. But almost the entire system is degraded by years of underspending on pumping and storage systems.
Infrastructure collapsing
Even when there is adequate stored water, it still has to get to people’s homes through 12,000km of pipes. Many of those pipes are far past their replacement age and are collapsing.
They break in one area, that break gets fixed, and there’s another break a short distance away. The reality is the same for much of Johannesburg’s infrastructure – if no proper maintenance is done for 30 years, then everything will begin to break at once.
The situation is bad. Half of Johannesburg’s reservoirs are leaking. Almost all need upgrading to cope with increasing demands caused by densification or population increase.
Hursthill, which supplies Coronationville, has two reservoirs. They are 80 and 100 years old. One is broken and empty. The other has a crack and cannot be filled more than halfway. Both are scheduled to be fixed, but the fixes will take months and construction schedules are often interrupted as contractors stop work because they are not being paid.
The nearby Brixton tower upgrade is almost completed. It was a project that was initiated by and fought for by former DA ward councillor Bridget Steer. It was stopped under the ANC and then budgeted for under the DA’s administration in 2021. It’s been delivered behind schedule, but will soon start operating. It is a key part of a number of projects in that system, which will also include a new pumping station. It is one of the few success stories for Joburg Water, or will be, if the city pays the contractors.
Read more: Joburg’s water infrastructure – a picture of decline and underinvestment
Pipe replacement, leaks and unpaid contractors
Water pipes are supposed to have a lifespan of about 40 years. To keep up with replacements, a city the size of Johannesburg has to keep replacing about 250-300km of piping every year. That is just to keep up with ageing pipes. Building new infrastructure to cope with a backlog, it would have to be much more.
This year, just 85km is scheduled for replacement up until next June. The previous year, it was 15km. Under the brief DA city government, in 2018/19,143 km of pipes were replaced. Replacements were up and leaks went down. This year, leaks will probably reach a record of above 100,000. The situation is bad and getting worse every year.
The result of this lack of investment is that the city loses about 400 million litres to leaks every day. In percentage terms, that’s around a quarter of all water purchased from Rand Water. Add that to almost another 25% that is used, but not paid for. When half the water purchased cannot be sold, it is a sure recipe for a financially unviable business.
Even worse is the fact that receipts from water sold are put into the general city account. That leads directly to the situation where contractors, for the Brixton tower project, for instance, are not paid. The DA recently established that R4-billion was absent from Joburg Water’s accounts.
The money does not appear to have gone missing, but was moved to other city accounts to meet pressing needs. The administration admitted that the first priority in the cash-strapped city was to pay staff salaries, and money would be taken from anywhere to meet those needs. It is not clear when and if that money will be returned to Joburg Water.
Read more: R4bn diverted from Joburg Water — Auditor‑General says cash exists ‘on paper’
Dodgy water tanker contracts
Another very suspicious aspect of this is that, like many municipalities across the country, Johannesburg has dodgy water tanker contracts.
The most prominent story in this regard is the one concerning 20-something-year-old men who own companies which rent water tankers to the city in terms of contracts amounting to R223-million. There is a clear incentive for these contracts to be crooked.
The more water outages there are, the more water tankers are necessary to provide emergency supplies and the greater the motivation for fat tanker contracts.
It’s hard to sort out fact from fiction on this subject, but many people have voiced suspicions that the water supply is interrupted (for example, by shutting off valves) and stays off for longer than necessary, so as to give the water tankers greater scope for work.
Read more: Water tanker cadres keep cashing in on R223m Joburg contract despite court action
The fix — sound management
There is no magic bullet to fix this. What is required is not magic, but predictable, even boringly predictable, sound management. What needs to be done is impossible without sound management of the city’s finances.
One immediate step that should be taken is to ringfence the finances of the entities. Money earned by Joburg Water services should be spent by Joburg Water and shouldn’t vanish to meet the needs of some other badly run entity.
When the money is there, it should go to a carefully prioritised programme of repairs.
During the brief previous periods of DA governance, realising there was not enough money to immediately fix the pipe infrastructure, what money there was, was directed to fixing the most critical leaks. On its own, that succeeded in cutting leaks and losses. The city’s budget is too constrained to immediately start replacing 300km of pipes every year. Fixing the finances will be a slow process, and the target will take time to achieve.
There’s another important principle that appears to have been forgotten by the current administration and the decades of ANC administrations – planning must be tied to infrastructure capacity.
Instead of happily giving the go-ahead to new developments, infrastructure must be funded and installed first. There is supposed to be a charge on new developments to cover infrastructure, but this also seems to disappear into general city coffers.
We’ve all seen the overloaded sewerage systems that result, or the traffic-choked roads, or the electrical outages from overloaded systems.
The principles for fixing Joburg’s water are the same for all the entities: Sound financial management, accompanied by properly accountable staff, right down, from management to contractors.
Together with proper planning, this would be the winning combination. But we first have to be voted into office. DM
Helen Zille is the chairperson of the DA’s Federal Council, and the DA’s 2026 mayoral candidate for Johannesburg.