Water crisis: ‘Worse yet to come’
Joburg’s water crisis exposed a chain of disaster including the political and managerial collapse in South Africa’s biggest city
● While Rand Water continues to investigate how a crucial valve in its water system stayed closed for days, contributing to huge water shortages across Johannesburg, experts say South Africans should brace for an “acceleration” of water supply disasters.
“What we know from other parts of the country is that once these breakdowns happen, they happen more frequently and for longer,” water expert Anthony Turton told the Sunday Times.
“So this is a precursor of bigger things to come. It is not just the new normal, it’s the start of a new trend which is likely to see an acceleration of failures.”
Part of the reason is that water systems were not designed to run dry. “When they run dry, air enters and it takes a couple of days, maybe a week, to repressurise the system. Airlocks go through the system and cause all kinds of damage, and you simply get an accelerated failure after you repressurise the system.”
Turton said this was a well-known engineering fact, “so we can expect failures to simply accelerate”.
“South Africa has now crossed a threshold in terms of water security and we are starting to see major systems fail. And the more your officials deny the failure, the more it betrays their absolute and total lack of understanding of the complexity of the issue,” he said.
Turton, from the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State, said the closed-valve saga either spoke to “gross incompetence” on Rand Water’s part or a breakdown of law and order if it turned out that the valve had been closed on purpose, in a case of sabotage.
“It’s a concern for two reasons. If the management of Joburg Water was unaware of it, it speaks to gross incompetence on their behalf. If, on the other hand, it was closed for nefarious reasons, in other words for reasons of potential mischief-making, sabotage [or] possible terrorism, then it speaks to the breakdown of law and order in the country and this now propels the whole Joburg water crisis into a crisis of national security importance.
“Johannesburg is effectively the financial capital of Sub-Saharan Africa, and if any individual can willy-nilly just close off a valve that is so mission-critical that it can bring a sizeable portion of the city to its knees, it means national security safety measures are not adequately in place.
Lengthy water cuts would have “serious implications for investor confidence”, Turton said.
Wits professor Craig Sheridan, director and founder of the Centre in Water Research and Development, said it was hard to comprehend how the lapse had occurred as it was “outside the frame of what should be able to happen”.
“Somewhere along the line someone should have seen that there was no water flowing, and if it’s supposed to be flowing and there’s an obstruction you can find this stuff out. [Officials must be asked], why are you not actively engaging the system?”
Sheridan said lengthy water cuts had become the new norm across South Africa and this would be the case for “at least another six years” due to the lack of maintenance, the country’s increasing population and poor water consumption patterns by citizens.
“We’re right at the edge of what we can provide for people at our current consumption rate. I don’t see any way forward because we’ve got an increasing population, less water, infrastructure that is not as good as it was ... and we’ve got a populace which is not, on the whole, actively reducing their consumption.
He said water was not like electricity, “without which one could live forever ... you can’t live without water”.
Joburg Water has been battling to return water to taps in some parts of the city after a series of issues, most notably one at Rand Water’s Eikenhof pump station on March 3.
Joburg Water’s Nombuso Shabalala told the Sunday Times yesterday that most of the agency’s systems had either improved or recovered over the past week.
“There are a few systems experiencing poor pressure due to airlocks, specifically Blairgowrie. Technical teams are on the ground flushing out the network to improve supply pressure and protect the infrastructure against multiple pipe bursts that can result from airlocks,” Shabalala said.
Asked about the investigation into the closed valve, Rand Water spokesperson Makenosi Maroo was unable to give an update. “Like any organisation, Rand Water conducts investigations. In this instance it is a technical investigation,” Maroo said.
He did not answer further questions, referring the Sunday Times to an interview Rand Water COO Mahlomola Mehlo gave on 702.
In that interview, Mehlo said the valve issue was picked up during an analysis of the system by Joburg Water officials, who noticed that the Waterval reservoir was filling up rapidly, which prompted an investigation.
He was unable to clarify which valve was affected, as Rand Water has “more than 6,000 valves. So we’re not necessarily talking about a single valve that is operational at any given time. We have to operate a number of them.”
Mehlo said water was moved between metros to ensure a balance and that “everyone got some water. In that process, you open and close valves daily.”
Asked if it was sabotage or human error, he responded: “It’s neither. First, our valve chambers have a locking mechanism. Second, our valves are so huge that to open one you need a minimum of two people to turn the spindle. So the valve would have been closed in efforts to push water from one system to another.”
Over 11 days in the national water month of March, residents of Johannesburg were pushed to the edge by a water outage that cut across the city from Soweto in the south to Randpark Ridge in the north.
Residents were told the outage, which started on Sunday March 3, was caused by a power failure at one of Rand Water’s biggest pump stations, Eikenhof, as a result of a lightning strike. Eikenhof is powered by City Power, and did not have a backup system. This was followed by two more power outages which then affected the levels of reservoirs fed by Eikenhof and managed by Johannesburg Water.
Some of these reservoirs — such as the Commando system — have been plagued by failures for far longer. Then 10 days into the crisis, it was revealed that a valve on a pipeline had been shut, which affected water flow from Rand Water to Joburg Water.
But this water crisis did not start with the lightning strike or end with a closed valve. It had been more than 10 years in the making.
According to the Gauteng City-Region Observatory’s “Quality of Life” report in November 2022, water interruptions in Gauteng increased between 2017/2018 and 2020/2021. The report found that the main cause was ageing, inadequate or poorly maintained water infrastructure, vandalism and theft.
The 2023 “No Drop Report” from the national department of water & sanitation highlights that Johannesburg loses 44% of its water supply through non-revenue water that includes stolen water, nonbillable water and leaks. The leaks account for 25% of fresh drinking water lost due to failing infrastructure.
The political and administrative aspects have had direct and indirect effects on our water sources. Political changes and battles, administrative inefficiencies and governance issues have weakened our water management and resulted in poor planning. For almost a decade, poor decisions related to water allocation, lack of infrastructure investment and maintenance, and inefficient policy implementation have shaped the current situation.
The city’s shaky coalition and several changes in mayoral leadership have resulted in poor service delivery in general. Some can argue that this instability extends to Rand Water and the national department. It has gone through significant positive change under the leadership of the minister, Senzo Mchunu, but it has a decade of poor governance to fix.
The failing infrastructure is a direct result of management failure at Joburg Water and the City of Johannesburg. The budget allocated to maintenance has consistently been inadequate. On paper, there appears to be sufficient spending that seems quite sensible, as city budgets show that Joburg Water spends 9%-10% of the value of water assets on maintenance. However, the repairs and maintenance budget allocates most of the money to personnel and only a tiny amount to inventory.
The city’s 2023/2024 budget doesn’t have a breakdown for Joburg Water, but shows the split on the city’s overall repairs and maintenance budget: 58% on contractors, 31% on staff, just 3.4% on “inventory consumed” and the remaining 8% on “other”.
Contractors are notoriously expensive. The city budgets show that Joburg Water brings in about 22% of the city’s revenue through water & sanitation services, and receives about 20% of the maintenance budget but only about 13% of the city’s capital expenditure budget (which covers both building new assets and renewal of existing assets).
This is clearly not working.
In addition, the management chaos has a direct impact on how the entities communicate with consumers. Instead of officials having open and transparent exchanges with residents and businesses, the public was either ignored or bombarded with PowerPoint technical jargon that alienated them, increased frustration and diminished levels of trust.
The different bodies involved — such as Rand Water, Joburg Water and the City of Johannesburg — are often caught up in finger pointing, and messaging tends to be fragmented and inconsistent, confusing residents. This wasn’t helped by mayor Kabelo Gwamanda’s absence from public view for much of the crisis.
The lack of trust is compounded by authorities blaming high water usage and demand as a reason for the outages. This may be true and while we must all change our relationship with water, the reality is that poor planning has not taken into account population increases. Rand Water abstracts the same amount of water for a population that has grown from 12-million to 15.1-million people. The delay in the Lesotho Highlands Phase 2 project means Rand Water will not have more water until 2030.
The leaks in the Joburg Water infrastructure are a far greater problem. The Johannesburg water challenges reach beyond the city boundaries and reverberate throughout the entire country. South Africa is a waterscarce country and climate change is only going to make things worse. The high water losses and pollution add stress to the failing system.
The Green Drop, Blue Drop and No Drop reports that were released by the department of water & sanitation in December 2023, published after years of failure to produce them, revealed a distressing decline in the ability of municipalities to supply clean water to residents and treat wastewater effectively. The reports exposed the severity of the water crisis in the country, highlighting a disturbing trend of compromised water quality, with 46% of drinking systems not complying with microbiological standards, 67.6% of wastewater treatment works failing to clean raw sewage, industrial and pharmaceutical waste and 47.4% of water lost due to leaks or unaccounted for.
There is deep inequality of access to water in South Africa with lower-income communities having less access than wealthier ones. Only 46% of people have a tap in their homes while millions depend on communal taps and as much as 10% of the population still depend on rivers, dams and streams for their water supplies (and most are polluted). The rights of both people and ecosystems are being threatened.
We are at a critical juncture. This is not the beginning of the water woes in this country and neither is it the end. What we are seeing now will continue and could get worse if we do not act with urgency. The end of Johannesburg’s water woes will require a multifaceted approach focused on collaborative action, simplified messaging and a commitment to transparency.
In the short to medium term, the authorities must work together to provide a far better plan for infrastructure repair and upgrades, identifying and fixing leaks, ensuring an adequate budget for infrastructure maintenance, renewal and extension, tackling vandalism, and improving access to clean drinking water. It is an indication of the depths of the leadership crisis that such a plan does not yet exist.
There must be an improvement in communication that can provide honest updates, explain challenges and share progress to foster dialogue. Given the loadshedding challenges, there need to be backup systems for emergencies. We have had years of power outages, so systems should be in place for this. As South
Africa’s biggest city, Johannesburg should be leading the way in best-practice water systems.
WaterCAN, and other civil society groups, have taken proactive steps by setting up the Johannesburg Water Forum in collaboration with Joburg Water, Rand Water and the department of water & sanitation.
While this forum represents a crucial platform for dialogue and co-operation, challenges persist.
It is only through collective effort by civil society, government and other stakeholders that we can overcome water challenges in South Africa. As ordinary people, we must keep putting pressure on the government and we need to stand up and fight back against mismanagement and corruption.