Over the past few weeks, the richest and most populous province in SA has been experiencing severe water outages.
Johannesburg, the richest city in the country, has been hardest hit, with some suburbs and townships experiencing multi-day outages that have brought households and businesses to their knees.
Protests have been happening across the province. While they are less violent than the devastating scenes that we witnessed in Westbury and Coronationville in September when police fired rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades at residents protesting weeks-long water outages, they are not less concerning.
Many explanations have been given by government officials about the cause of the ongoing crisis, but two in particular demand reflection. The first and most cited explanation is that the province has consumption levels that are far above the national average.
This is true, but not for the reasons that people have been led by municipal authorities to believe. The argument about high levels of consumption is curiously framed as a question of residents using more water than is available.
And indeed, consumption in Johannesburg, particularly, is more than 300 litres per person per day, which is well above the 237-litre national average and the 173-litre global average.
But direct human consumption is not the main cause of the crisis. The main driver of this high consumption figure is non-revenue water.
Around 46% of the water in Johannesburg is lost within the municipal system before reaching the consumer. About 32.9% to 35% of this water is physically lost through leaks and ageing infrastructure, while the remainder is attributed to commercial losses such as illegal connections, meter inaccuracies and theft.
The high number of pipe bursts in the city amounts to more than 4,500 a month, with about 575 megalitres of water lost weekly. This is an indication of severe infrastructure degradation — one that has a devastating impact on municipal revenue.
The city is haemorrhaging about R7bn annually in lost revenue and water losses, constraining resources for public services, including water infrastructure.
The second explanation that officials have been giving pertains to the recent explosion of a motor connected to one of the pumps at the Zuikerbosch water treatment plant that is managed by Rand Water.
As a result of the incident, the system experienced a loss of 1,800 megalitres a day. Within 24 hours, the bulk water utility had recovered 1,400 megalitres. The incident affected reservoirs within the Palmiet, Eikenhof and Mapleton systems, but if municipalities in Gauteng had proper water governance systems, the situation would have been far less severe.
This is because when unplanned maintenance events like this occur, municipalities are supposed to use their own reserves to ensure continued supply.
For years, the water sector has been making an urgent push for municipalities to ensure that storage reservoirs can provide 48 to 72 hours of water supply. This requirement, adopted as one of the most critical water and sanitation bylaws in municipalities across the country, is driven by the need for increased resilience against infrastructure failure, maintenance shutdowns and high consumer demand.
But due to failing infrastructure resulting from poor water governance, most municipalities have been failing to meet this standard. The same municipal water and sanitation services bylaws dictate that commercial buildings, hospitals and public institutions are required to have on-site storage tanks with a minimum capacity to sustain operations for 48 hours during disruptions.
This standard too is not being met by municipalities, resulting in water outages having a severe impact on public institutions, including schools and hospitals.
These two explanations that politicians and government officials are providing about the causes of the water crisis in Gauteng are a deflection.
By centring direct human consumption and the explosion at the Zuikerbosch Water Treatment Plant, they want us to believe that residents and Rand Water caused the crisis. In reality, years of poor water governance, poor financial management and non-revenue water are the reasons that our province has been brought to the brink.
The crisis we are experiencing is not about supply problems by the bulk water utility; it is a governance issue. We must not succumb to the disinformation that is being perpetuated.
