Infrastructure failure pushes Joburg towards day zero

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JEREMY MAGGS: Johannesburg’s water system is under growing and severe strain, residents in many suburbs now enduring prolonged outages and infrastructure failure.

There’s also a bitter dispute now over bonus payments at Johannesburg Water. That is slowing repairs, even as civil society groups warned that the city is living in some kind of day zero scenario.

Experts from organisations like WaterCAN say poor communication, ageing systems and management dysfunction are deepening public distrust and prolonging the water (outages).

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This is a very important and disturbing issue. Let’s get into more detail with Dr Ferrial Adam, who is executive director of WaterCAN. Dr Adam, a very warm welcome. You have been attending a briefing today from the mayor of Johannesburg (Dada Morero), have you learned anything new?

FERRIAL ADAM: Good day, Jeremy. Actually, not much. I think some of the things he’s been saying, he’s been saying often, and we’ve heard it before.

What was quite alarming for me is that there’s this sense that things are okay. There are a few areas that don’t have water, but generally things are okay, and we are working on the issues where there are problems.

I asked the question, how can you say that when there are areas like Melville, Emmarentia and Kensington, some of these areas have not had water for about 22 days?

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That clearly is a day zero situation, because that’s one of the things he also said, is that we don’t have a day zero. Then I said that and then he said that’s true, those people who don’t have water are experiencing a day zero. So that was a win for us because he’s acknowledged that.

Then he talked about R500 million that they’re going to get for reservoirs. This is old news. There’s nothing new that’s coming in this briefing.

JEREMY MAGGS: Is that really a win though? We are effectively living under day zero conditions. If so, surely the city at this point should be declaring a crisis formally? Or do you think that we’re not there yet?

FERRIAL ADAM: I think that’s exactly where we’re moving with this whole idea of this is a day zero and we’re living it. There needs to be a national disaster declared in the City of Joburg, and it’s not a climate national disaster, it’s an infrastructural disaster.

We cannot go through another year of having large parts of Joburg just without water and very poor communication, so that we have people just accepting there’s no water.

Day zero has become a lived reality.

JEREMY MAGGS: What’s the worst-case scenario that you’re looking at over the next 12 to 18 months then, if either nothing changes or there’s just simply incremental attention paid to the problem?

FERRIAL ADAM: I think if we don’t get some strong intervention in this short period, some of the gains we made last year, and I’ve been interviewed last year where I said, if we do what Joburg Water’s planned turnaround strategy is, if we implement that as fast as possible, we could have a stable system in two to three years.

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If we don’t, and if we carry on this trajectory, you’re looking at five years, if not longer. I won’t say that it’s a point of no return, but I am concerned if we don’t act and get the national attention that we need.

JEREMY MAGGS: What does strong intervention then, in that respect, actually mean?

FERRIAL ADAM: We are saying that the president (Cyril Ramaphosa) must not, in his Sona (State of the Nation Address), give empty promises, but he must give actual things that can happen on the ground. We want to see that ring-fencing of funds happens quickly.

Now, Jeremy, they’ve been talking about ring-fencing of funds. We’ve asked for it. We’ve been campaigning for it for about three years.

Last year the president (mentioned it) in his speech. They take so long to get these things done. But if you were hosting a G20, all of a sudden, things change.

I do think that they can act quickly. When they tell us that no, you can’t, they just don’t want to.

So they need to ring-fence the funding for water and sanitation. They need to increase the budget for Joburg Water. It just needs simple things.

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You need to fix a few reservoirs to create a stable system. Finish Brixton, get the Hurst Hill 1 and 2 going, and Alexander Park, and fix the Crosby and Hector Norris Pump Stations. That is what is needed just to get us stable.

JEREMY MAGGS: Why do you think that’s not happening? How difficult is that to start on the trajectory that you’re recommending?

FERRIAL ADAM: The first problem is, and the main problem is, that Joburg Water does not have control over its budget. The City of Joburg may say to Joburg Water, okay, your allocation in the budget is R1.7 billion for capex. But they don’t have that money in the bank.

So what happens then is they don’t have money to pay contractors. Then projects all get delayed and workers down tools. So they cannot function with this stop-start staccato behaviour. We need it to be streamlined, flowing like water and working.

At the end of October 2025, Joburg Water owed R1 billion to 203 contractors. The reason Brixton Reservoir and Tower have not been completed yet is because there were disputes about payments.

JEREMY MAGGS: The ongoing bonus dispute that I mentioned at the start of our conversation, and also the go-slow at Johannesburg Water, Dr Adam, how is that impacting emergency repairs and maintenance?

FERRIAL ADAM: It’s completely impacting it. The whole Commando System that has been without water for all these days I’ve mentioned, they could not continue with walking down the line and trying to figure out what the technical issue is. That was the one thing. So that was delayed by about four or five days.

There were no water tankers. So you have no water, but there are no water tankers. Think about the vulnerable people who cannot afford to just go to the shops and buy those five litres or whatever people are buying.

It does impact on that as well. Then any burst pipes or leakages anywhere else in the city, you don’t have a team to fix it. So it just creates chaos.

JEREMY MAGGS: The whole issue of outages in poorer or informal areas. Are they, Dr Adam, disproportionately worse, and if so, do you have any sense of what is being done to prioritise the most affected communities within that paradigm?

FERRIAL ADAM: Yes, I do think it’s worse. Because if we look at a lot of the informal settlements that we’ve been working with, they are completely reliant on JoJo tanks or water tankers.

So any kind of thing that goes down with the water tankers, and let’s be honest, water tankers should not be the norm. Also, the number of people who live in these communities, water tankers cannot manage to give them all water.

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They go at times when … Last night, I believe at midnight, there were water tankers in Melville. Who’s going to go and collect water at midnight? There isn’t a good roster of how these tankers are working. They don’t have enough water, so when you are at the water tanker, they’ll say, we’ve run out of water, and whoever is still in the queue, tough for them.

That’s the one thing. The second thing we’ve realised is they also use, and we must always link water and sanitation, they also have to use these VIP toilets, and they’re on street corners. So people are drinking bad water, they’re getting diarrhoea. They’re having issues with VIP toilets, having to go there, (especially) women in the middle of the night.

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The third thing is people are then forced to start thinking about how they spend their basic salary, or their little bit of money that they do have. Do they buy food? Do they buy water? Do they buy their medication? These are the questions people are asking themselves, like, what can I do today?

For the elderly, we know that some of the people can’t carry the buckets, they can’t walk all the way to the water tankers or the JoJo tanks. They’re paying, they’re using their Sassa (South African Social Security Agency) grant to pay young men R20, R50 to go and fetch water for them.

In essence, they’re double paying for water.

JEREMY MAGGS: Well, there’s absolutely no doubt the situation, from what I’m hearing, is getting a lot worse. Dr Ferrial Adam, thank you very much indeed, executive director of the organisation WaterCAN.

You’ve been attending a briefing of the Johannesburg mayor. Let’s hear from the city’s mayor now, Dada Morero, speaking at that briefing earlier today.

DADA MORERO: We are not near to day zero. But yes, for people who have not had water at all, logically, it would mean they’ve been at day zero. We need to make sure that we look at those areas, sort those areas that have been adversely affected, and ensure that we can pick up.

I think the weather is also not assisting, in terms of the heatwave, and people are consuming more water. So we need to ensure that we pick up (MD …… 9:08) and the team.

We have also taken a decision this morning that we will be visiting all the depots, meeting with the actual engineers on the ground, technicians on the ground, to understand the gravity of the challenges that we have.

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