From the end of December 2024 until mid January 2025, Gauteng and more specifically the city of Johannesburg received between 25-50mm of rain. The rain has been largely welcomed in the province which had not received consistent rain for many months. With the rain, the dams have been slowly filling up as well. However, the water crisis facing the City of Johannesburg and Gauteng is still very much growing. Why?
By Fatima Moosa
The water crisis facing Johannesburg and Gauteng is a complicated issue that can be divided into three main categories – none of which have anything to do with the amount of water available. The three main issues are mismanagement, ageing infrastructure and overuse which Professor Anja du Plessis, water management expert at Unisa, has termed the three horsemen of the water crisis. Pemmy Majodina, the Minister of Water and Sanitation has also said that the aging infrastructure, illegal water connections, and insufficient interventions have compounded the crisis. Majodina described the situation as a “self-inflicted crisis”.
Part of the mismanagement and the biggest issue in Gauteng and the City of Johannesburg according to Ayesha Laher, director of AHL Water and an environmental scientist, is non-revenue water. Non-revenue water refers to water which is unaccounted for and is essentially water that has been produced and is “lost” before it reaches the customer. There can be a number of different reasons why the water is lost from illegal connections to water leaks. Therefore even if the water supply remains consistent and water comes into the system, there will still be a huge amount of water that is lost. This is because as Laher termed “pushing more water through a leaking pipe means you’re only getting more leaks”.
It was revealed by the deputy minister of water and sanitation, David Mahlobo that out of the five billion litres of treated water distributed daily by Rand Water, an astonishing 2.3 billion litres—nearly half—is lost due to leaks and unmaintained municipal infrastructure. This results in a non-revenue water rate of 49.2%.
In 2024, during a roundtable in December, Johannesburg Water’s managing director Ntshaveni Mukwevho said the City has 46% non-revenue water, which is water that is put into the reticulation system, for which no money is recovered.
“The two biggest components of non-revenue water are physical leakage, which is almost always the bigger share, and commercial losses, which can be anything from meter errors, to billing system issues, to reservoirs that overflow. The portion of non-revenue water that is physical water losses is around 35% [of the total amount of water that enters the system],” he said.
The general lack of data and accurate numbers from the City of Johannesburg and Joburg Water has also compounded the situation and makes it difficult for a proper plan to be created for maintenance and to fix all the issues.
Aging infrastructure is another issue where a lot of the infrastructure in the water system needs to be urgently renewed and replaced. Replacing all of the aging pipes and other infrastructure is going to be a lot of work. In 2019, the City of Johannesburg released a statement saying that Joburg Water, which manages over 12 000 km of the water distribution network in the City of Johannesburg, plans to spend over R1.2 billion to replace ageing water infrastructure over the next three years. Almost five years on from this statement, the huge problem of ageing infrastructure remains and has in fact worsened.
In December 2024, extensive maintenance was completed on both of the main pumping stations in the City of Johannesburg. The Eikenhof pump station underwent an 86-hour shutdown, while the Zwartkopjes pump station faced 36 hours of maintenance work. The two pump stations deliver purified water from the bulk supplier to two-thirds of Johannesburg’s CBD, the Deep South and the West. Many people across Johannesburg were without water for days as the system took time to recover – exacerbating the already dire water crisis in the city.
This water system works very differently from the power system where even during maintenance, once it is completed, a switch is put on and the electricity can be restored. With the water system, the reservoirs need to fill up and because the system is made up of many different reservoirs with some areas being supplied by a reservoir far from the main one which takes a long time to fill up. Even if the reservoir fills up, the water might be finished in the first reservoir before it even has time to journey to the other reservoirs in the system.
Confused about which reservoirs and water towers provide your suburb with water? Check out this handy tool from The Outlier for more information.
It is a combination of all these issues and the lack of political will which is contributing to the already massive crisis facing the City of Johannesburg and Gauteng. In part two of this series, we will take a closer look at How the water system in the city of Johannesburg works.
Salaam Foundation has launched a fundraising campaign to buy a water tanker truck that will be used to deliver water to those in dire need as the water crisis facing Johannesburg and South Africa worsens.
Salaam Foundation
FNB
6266 914 7665
Branch 250 736
Ref: water + your name (zkt/lillah)
Give the gift of water to those most in need with Salaam Foundation
