Hole in the bucket: Interruptions in the supply of clean water may disrupt eThekwini’s December holiday season. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy
Amid the country-wide water crisis, Rand Water has revealed that 2.5 billion litres of the 5.2 billion litres it provides to Gauteng municipalities daily is lost through leaks, ageing instructure and theft.
Several communities in Johannesburg, including Midrand, Winchester Hills, Soweto and parts of Tshwane, have been without water for several weeks, a repeat of the problems experienced throughout Gauteng last summer.
At a joint media briefing on Monday with the national water and sanitation department, the Gauteng government and the City of Johannesburg, Rand Water board chair Ramateu Monyokolo said 48% of the water that the utility provides to the province’s municipalities is lost each day.
Monyokolo said municipalities were working with Rand Water to address the crisis but the situation was exacerbated by high temperatures. He said an additional 150 million litres of water had been added to the system from April to sustain supply and a further 450 million litres a day would be added by the end of the financial year.
Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero said the bulk of the city’s water losses were as a result of leaking pipes and illegal connections.
This was of major concern to the city as it was not able to recover the losses. Forty-five of the city’s reservoirs were not in good condition and Johannesburg would have to find the money to maintain them, he said.
The municipality had invested in the repair and refurbishment of 11 reservoirs, which would assist in improving the water supply when the work on them was finished in the middle of next year, the mayor added.
Morero said the city’s infrastructure was “too old”, with pipes in some parts of the city not having been replaced for 50 years or longer.
“We have to do something with the replacement and I think we have been trying to do something in that relation,” he said.
Last year, the City of Johannesburg approved a motion to acquire water from other sources instead of depending exclusively on Rand Water. This meant the city could potentially get water from wells and underground rivers or springs to ease the pressure on municipal utility Johannesburg Water.
ANC councillor Masindi Mmbengwa, who brought the motion in council, said this could add 35% to 45% of water to the system. The city must have a team of experts to research the quantity of underground water and the cost of processing it and project how long it would last.
On Monday, Morero said work had been done and Johannesburg Water would soon be able to give a final report on the research on groundwater, especially in Doornfontein and Ellis Park.
“We are also looking at a contract with Gautrain so that we can retrieve the water that they have to always drain out so that we can use that clean water and feed it back into our system,” he said.
Water and Sanitation Minister Pemmy Majodina said the crisis in Gauteng municipalities was due to their failure to manage their own infrastructure.
“What we are going through in Gauteng, and all the 11 municipalities of Gauteng, is self-inflicted pain by municipalities where they are unable to do the necessary things to operate their reservoirs and water resources as well as maintenance,” she said.
The demand for water in Johannesburg continues to grow as a result of economic expansion and population increase, Majodina said, adding that the government had anticipated this growth in demand and put in place plans to address it as far back as the 1980s.
She said the main underlying cause of the water supply disruptions in Johannesburg was therefore that peak demand was close to, and occasionally exceeded, the available supply from Rand Water.
The supply-and-demand relationship for treated water in Johannesburg is “very tight” and the system is vulnerable to disturbances caused by electro-mechanical breakdowns or spikes in demand caused by heat waves, Majodina said.
“The 2023 No Drop report issued by [the water and sanitation department] found that water losses in Johannesburg were 35%, compared to the international norm of 15%,” she said.
“Reducing water losses requires a multi-pronged approach by the city including, amongst others, improving billing and revenue collection to increase the funds available for maintenance and to provide better incentives for water to be used efficiently.”
Majodina said there was also a need to improve pressure management, replace ageing pipes which burst frequently and install water metres or replace dysfunctional bulk and customer water metres so that water flows could be measured accurately to determine the location of the losses.
Little appears to have changed since last summer, when then water and sanitation minister Senzo Mchunu identified population growth and seasonal heat as the reasons Gauteng residents were facing water shortages.
At the time, Johannesburg Water senior networks manager Logan Munsamy also gave the population growth in the city as a reason, while chief operating officer Derrick Kgwale said high temperatures were worsening the crisis.
On Monday, Majodina’s deputy David Mahlobo said residents needed to start collecting water.
In 2022, during his previous stint as mayor, Morero had suggested that residents in Johannesburg should consider buying tanks to help preserve water for drinking and cooking.
“Our recommendation is that, going forward, even when we build, we must build even the design of the roofs, they must be in such a way that they actually capture the water,” Mahlobo said on Monday
This was supported by Majodina who said that residents should not fill up their tanks with tap water.
“Harvest water from the rain — don’t fill up your water with our purified water,” she said.
Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi said the province needed to reduce the consumption of water at a faster pace or face the potential collapse of the system in the longer term.
“It’s in our best interests that the consumption of water is reduced. This is a red line that Rand Water has given us. We are not only above the red line, but we are far above the red line, and we need to go back towards that red line,” he said.
“The last time we were reasonably below that red line was in 2023. It is an indication that it is doable that we can pull back the consumption. We need to change the attitude and the sooner we change the attitude, the better.”
Lesufi said the province did not want to get to a point where it needed to switch off water to residents and that they needed to invest in a high-level communication programme to educate residents.