South Africa’s richest city is falling apart

Johannesburg’s deteriorating water infrastructure, managed by Joburg Water, is exaggerating the impact of maintenance from Rand Water on the city’s water supply. 

This is because Joburg Water has failed to do the required maintenance on municipal infrastructure, resulting in leakages at its reservoirs and an inability to get water from the bulk supplier to the end user efficiently. 

The pending collapse of the city’s water infrastructure is symbolic of its wider decline, with the country’s economic hub increasingly showing signs of decay. 

This is feedback from WaterCAN’s Dr Ferrial Adam, who explained that the majority of the blame should lie at the feet of Joburg Water and not Rand Water. 

Adam’s comments come amidst warnings from the Joburg Mayor, Dada Morero, that residents may experience up to seven days without water due to maintenance from Rand Water. 

This is the final phase of Rand Water maintenance, and the third of three planned phases for the December 2025 to January 2026 period. 

The 54-hour maintenance session will take place at the Eikenhof pump station.

Adam explained that you have to separate Rand Water from Joburg Water. Rand Water is the bulk supplier, while Joburg Water manages the municipality’s infrastructure. 

“In terms of their maintenance, Rand Water has been doing the required amount in 2024 and 2025. That has been important,” Adam told Newzroom Afrika. 

“When looking at the state of water supply in Joburg, that is Joburg Water, where we are lacking adequate maintenance, and it is absolutely not doing enough.” 

Adam explained that typically, residents should not feel the effect of Rand Water’s maintenance on their water supply. 

Joburg Water’s reservoirs and pumping stations should have adequate storage and alternatives to ensure supply is not disrupted when Rand Water conducts maintenance upstream. 

“What is happening in Joburg specifically is that local municipal infrastructure is so fragile that anything that the bulk supplier does impacts directly on end users,” Adam said. 

“In a normal situation, we should not be feeling the impacts. Our reservoirs should have bulk storage to get us through these maintenance periods, but we don’t. We do not have that at all.”

Half of Joburg’s reservoirs are leaking, and some others are on bypass, so they cannot store sufficient water supply to minimise the impact of changes from Rand Water on end users. 

Long time coming

The deterioration of Joburg’s water infrastructure has been a long time coming, with the current crisis being the result of years of inadequate maintenance and mismanagement. 

The budget of South Africa’s richest city has been redirected over the past decade towards consumption, largely in the form of salaries, and not investment in infrastructure development or maintenance. 

Adam said that as South Africa heads towards a local government election later this year, more work will be done by the city to ensure a stable water supply to end users. 

“What we are experiencing in Johannesburg is the lack of maintenance done by Johannesburg Water, resulting in systems not functioning properly,” Adam said. 

“What we are seeing is the repetition of a cycle, whereby inadequate maintenance of infrastructure results in increased water losses and shortages.” 

The only way this can be halted is if Johannesburg Water gets an increased budget and uses the additional money to fund the maintenance of existing infrastructure. 

“Without that, we are going to continue seeing these cycles of the city going into winter with a very fragile system that is likely to fail in some areas due to load reduction or load-shedding,” Adam said. 

“When you start going into summer, there will be an increase in demand, and the system quite simply cannot meet that demand.” 

Adam warned that if Johannesburg Water does not increase its expenditure on maintenance, the city will continue to be in the mess it is currently in.

As it stands, Joburg does not have enough money to arrest the decline of its infrastructure and upgrade it to meet increased demand. 

Adam estimated that Joburg Water needs about R3 billion more to adequately upgrade its infrastructure and ensure it is up to standard. 

“The other concern is that while Joburg Water has a budget of R1.7 billion, there is nothing in its accounts. Even with the little budget they do have, they have no control over it,” Adam said. 

“What we saw last year was Joburg Water being unable to pay about 203 contractors worth R1 billion at the end of October.”

“They say they need to increase the budget, but the money that they have budgeted is not sitting in the account so that Joburg Water can do what it needs to.”