Water expert Prof Anja du Plessis says severely dilapidated infrastructure in the City of Johannesburg is to blame for the constant water outages that several communities have been experiencing over the past few years.
Severely affected areas include Midrand, Melville, Selby, South Hills and Ennerdale, among others.
Du Plessis says a combination of ageing infrastructure and poor planning for the city’s growing population is the main reason for water outages across the city.
She says, “Well, ultimately, unfortunately, it’s due to no planning. The population within Joburg has increased over the decades and unfortunately, the municipality did no forward planning, and they were supposed to increase the storage capacity of the city.”
Du Plessis says, “So in some instances what we are seeing is unfortunately due to that, in other instances it’s just due to dilapidated infrastructure where there are consistent water leaks, pipe bursts, creating poor pressure and especially in our high lying areas or those at the end of the row usually do not unfortunately have water due to our dilapidated infrastructure.”
NORTHERN CAPE
Some areas in the Northern Cape have felt the brunt of battling access to adequate water supply from municipalities in the past few years.
The Water and Sanitation Department says municipalities in the province are among the worst performing in the blue and green drop assessments.
This leads to residents digging deeper into their pockets to buy water.
The Department’s Director General Dr. Sean Phillips says the assessments of municipalities in 2023 showed a deterioration, with 29% of municipalities receiving critical scores.
Phillips says the Northern Cape’s performance is dismal, languishing at the bottom in comparison with other municipalities.
He says, “Most of the municipalities in the Northern Cape performed poorly in terms of the blue and green drop assessments and what we found is that many municipalities in the Northern Cape performed worse compared to the national average, in terms of not having the right people with the right qualifications employed at their water treatment works and waste water treatment works.”
The water crisis has seen many municipalities outsourcing service providers for water tankering. This has led to the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC) raising concerns over the huge amounts paid to those doing business with municipalities.
SAHRC Commissioner Dr. Henk Boshoff says, “We have identified in all the provinces, it is not possible to provide with the exact amount that is spend on water tanks, but it is exorbitant and although municipalities when we had these discussions with them over the past two years have indicated they are struggling with finances, it’s not possible to provide for services.”
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Additional reporting by Karabo Siyoko.
