Johannesburg Water Crisis Angers Voters and Drives Residents Off-Grid

Dry taps have become a daily frustration across Johannesburg, where municipal water infrastructure is haemorrhaging more than a third of its daily supply, according to data collected by the University of the Witwatersrand. As local elections approach in November, the commercial capital’s crumbling pipes and dry reservoirs have turned basic municipal services into a primary electoral liability for the ruling African National Congress.

The city loses an estimated 655 million litres of water a day through leaks and burst pipes, according to municipal figures. In neighbourhoods like Hillbrow, residents report going without running water for years. Thandani Masangu, a 17-year-old student, told Reuters he spent three hours wheeling empty containers on a trolley through trash-strewn streets searching for an alternative supply. Masangu and his friend Raymond Maleka eventually located a municipal water truck, but a security guard informed them that the water was reserved exclusively for residents of an adjacent tower block.

“I feel really broken,” Masangu said of the daily search for water.

Joburg Water, the municipal utility owned by the local authority, acknowledges that the crisis stems largely from severe underinvestment in aging assets. Zakhele Khuzwayo, a senior manager for innovation and technology at Joburg Water, stated in an interview that a significant portion of the city’s pipe network is more than 50 years old. “The city is aware of the limitations,” Khuzwayo said. “We know where we’d like to be … Now it’s a matter of paving the way to get there.”

Craig Sheridan, director and founder of the Centre in Water Research and Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, told Reuters that basic upkeep struggles to compete for municipal funds. “Maintenance is not sexy. It’s always more interesting to allocate funds to other areas,” Sheridan said, adding that the neglect extends across multiple categories of public infrastructure.

Compounding the physical decay is a severe municipal budget crisis. In July, the National Treasury withheld funding from Johannesburg after the local authority failed to meet basic financial management requirements. National authorities determined that the city’s R97.1bn budget was unfunded, as planned expenditures—including heightened municipal wages—significantly exceeded realistic revenue projections. A spokesperson for Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero did not respond to an emailed request for comment regarding the water supplies and the broader budgetary freeze.

Wealthy inhabitants of Johannesburg are increasingly bypassing the municipal system entirely by drilling private boreholes, a trend that deprives the utility of revenue needed to repair the network. Meanwhile, lower-income residents bear the brunt of the failures.

Lindiwe Ndlovu, a 53-year-old former ANC member who owns a flat in Hillbrow, said municipal authorities cut off her building’s water supply in 2019 over disputed debts. Ndlovu and her neighbors maintain that the utility relied on excessive estimates rather than accurate meter readings.

With local polls scheduled for November, the water crisis threatens to further erode political support for the ruling party. In the 2021 local elections, public anger over deteriorating municipal services reduced the ANC’s share of the vote to less than half for the first time since the end of apartheid, preceding a loss of its national majority less than three years later. Maleka, who is now old enough to vote, stated he will not cast his ballot for the ANC.