In a suburb of South Africa’s largest city, Johannesburg, hairdresser Allie John has had to adapt to frequent water outages.
John, bending over a plastic bucket, uses a jug to scoop out water to wash her client’s hair.
“I have water stored in the garage for an emergency. I have to heat and bring in buckets to use on my clients,” she said. “So, it’s very uncomfortable.”
Water outages have become part of daily life in Johannesburg. After the port city of Cape Town narrowly avoided becoming the world’s first major city to essentially run out of municipal water, South Africa continues to be plagued by water woes that have been worsened by climate change.
At her salon, John has even been out of water for up to three days at a time, something that threatens her business, even though her clients have been understanding. To deal with the problem, she’s investigated getting a personal water tank, which would cost around $1,000. And she’s even considered the popular, but more expensive, option of drilling narrow, personal wells called boreholes.
But the city’s water shortages are larger than what some individuals can pay for. The problems run throughout the entire water supply process.
The starting point is the state-owned entity Rand Water, which stores, treats and brings water to Johannesburg’s municipality. That supply was supposed to be increased through the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, which includes dams and tunnels. But, it’s eight years behind schedule.
Ferrial Adam, an analyst with the civic action group WaterCAN, explained that there has been almost a decade of corruption and underspending on water and sanitation.
“You had population growth and infrastructure deterioration, but you didn’t have enough water for the demand, and that is what we are experiencing right now,” Adam said.
But, Rand Water said that Johannesburg residents should take some of the blame.
“There is enough water, but the problem is the consumption,” spokesperson Makenosi Maroo said. “We are consuming more water than we are supposed to be consuming.”
She pointed to statistics showing that South Africans, and Johannesburg residents, in particular, consume more water than the world average. Maroo added that the problem lies, in part, with municipalities.
Nombuso Shabalala is the marketing and communications manager of Joburg Water, the Johannesburg municipality’s water agency.
“We’ve got aged infrastructure in the city of Johannesburg, and most of the challenges stem from that,” she said.
She explained that almost half of the water in the city never reaches people, or is not able to earn revenue. There is a portion that is given to all households for free. But, estimates say up to a third or more in the province is lost to leaks.
Beyond this, water being stolen or illegally accessed is a significant issue.
“It’s residents not adhering to bylaws of the city by connecting [pipes] illegally [to the city’s water system],” Shabalala said. “So, I think that’s mainly the problem, because it’s basically criminality.”
Joburg Water’s teams work around the city to identify and disconnect these connections. They dig them up while local police stand watch in case residents cause trouble.
If the digging reveals a professional-looking — but illegal — connection to the municipal system, it will be opened up and capped. Once the owner pays any outstanding fees and penalties, the team will come back and reinstall a lawful connection.
The manager for illegal connections, Tshepo Mokoena, revealed an illegal connection at one building where residents attached a hose to a fire hydrant. While the team served them a notice, they couldn’t turn off the water supply to the hydrant because that would be a fire hazard.
“They are likely to stay illegally connected, but internally, we do have processes where we go and reinvestigate properties we have disconnected to make sure they don’t reconnect themselves,” Mokoena said.
Sometimes, buildings are illegally reconnected to the system multiple times in a seemingly never-ending battle.
Richard Messner is a professor at the University of South Africa specializing in the politics of water management, and he is an expert on the province’s Platform for a Water Secure Gauteng, a multi-stakeholder initiative set up by the government.
He explained that spending more money to build and fix infrastructure is one immediate action the city can take.
Beyond this, he said, “there has to be a change in consumer behavior in both the private sector, as well as the government sector where government buildings or government departments don’t pay their bills.”
While change is possible and happening, it’s slow. Recently, South Africa’s president established a new water resource management agency, which he said he hopes will bring in more investment and streamline how water authorities are managed.
Until that is up and running, Johannesburg residents are likely to sit with dry taps for quite some time.