South Africa’s water woes: First Cape Town, now Johannesburg

To learn more about water solutions for Africa, join us at GLF Africa 2024: Greening the African Horizon on 17 September.

In 2018, Cape Town famously came perilously close to ‘Day Zero’ – the day when it would completely run out of municipal water.

Three consecutive years of low rainfall, combined with over-extraction for agriculture and to service the growing urban population, had almost run the city’s six large dams dry.

That day was only evaded through a combination of water restrictions and awareness campaigns that took the city through to the rainy season, when the dams were refilled.

Since then, Cape Town has curbed its demand for water and implemented better, more efficient systems, successfully cutting its water use by half in three years.

But has the rest of the country learned from this crisis?

Now, it’s the turn of Johannesburg, South Africa’s most populous city and industrial heart, to start worrying about the dwindling water in the dams that feed it.

Since late 2023, hardly a week has gone by without some residents of Johannesburg losing their water supply. In early March, a large swath of the city was left without water for 11 days after lightning hit a pump station.

Once that issue was resolved, supplier Rand Water warned Johannesburg and two neighboring municipalities, Tshwane and Ekurhuleni, that its system was on the verge of collapse.

Since then, about half of the city’s population has been without water or suffering from water shortages. The crisis is also impacting industry, as many of the region’s mines and factories cannot operate without water.

So, what’s causing these water shortages?

Why is Johannesburg running out of water?

The climate crisis has certainly played a role. South Africa has always been a relatively water-scarce country, and more extreme climatic events, such as prolonged droughts, have exacerbated that scarcity.

On top of that, El Niño has led to much lower than average rainfall across Southern Africa, combined with temperatures some 5 degrees Celsius above average.

Meanwhile, water consumption is climbing, especially due to this unusually hot weather.

According to Rand Water data released in March, Johannesburg was using 61 percent more water than it was permitted to by the government, while Ekurhuleni and Tshwane were using 80 percent and 63 percent more respectively.

Meanwhile, the populations of each of these places are growing, adding even more demand.

“It has always been an issue of overconsumption,” Kabelo Gwamanda, Johannesburg’s mayor, told local radio station 702 Talk Radio in an interview.

That’s certainly part of the problem: average water consumption in the region is 279 liters per day — more than 60 percent greater than the global average.

That consumption is not uniform: South Africa has the highest level of income inequality in the world.

While Johannesburg’s elites enjoy water-hungry swimming pools, large dwellings and lush gardens, the city’s poorest residents in informal settlements don’t even have taps or toilets in their homes.

“Unsustainable water use by the elite can exacerbate urban water crises at least as much as climate change or population growth,” say the co-authors of a recent study on uneven domestic water use across urban spaces.

A leaky water system

Yet it’s not only individuals’ fault for using too much water, according to Craig Sheridan, director of the Centre in Water Research and Development at the city’s University of the Witwatersrand.

“There is a mismatch between what’s allocated by the national government and what’s needed on the ground,” he writes in The Conversation.

“Also, 15 million people are relying on a system designed for far fewer people,” he adds. “When everyone starts to use water, there just isn’t enough to go around.”

There’s a plan to build a new hydroelectric dam in the Lesotho Highlands to serve that extra demand, but it’s currently eight years behind schedule.

Meanwhile, mismanagement and crumbling infrastructure also cut deeply into existing water supplies. In 2023, the city was losing 48.2 percent of its water to leakage and theft.

“The more that Rand Water pumps into this leaking sieve, the more they are depleting their reservoirs,” Anthony Turton, a professor at the Centre for Environmental Management at the University of the Free State, told Bloomberg News. “The system is now starting to self-destruct.”

That’s partly due to poor financial management, said Sheridan. “The maintenance bill for water infrastructure is ZAR 2 billion [USD 105 million] per year, but only ZAR 1 billion [USD 52 million] is allocated. Maintenance needs are spiraling out of control.

“The city bills residents for rates, water, electricity, sewage and other services. However, the funds received are not ring-fenced. Other projects are competing for the same pot of money.”

The social pact breaks

Since June, Rand Water has been carrying out urgent maintenance and infrastructure upgrades to try to mitigate the problem.

But the work poses increased short-term challenges as it requires total water outages in the areas being upgraded, further piling the pressure on people’s daily lives.

Many local people have had enough. On 2 July, residents in the city’s northern suburbs took to the streets, blocking rush-hour traffic, in protest over a nine-day water outage in their area.

“The social pact is breaking down,” said Sheridan. “This is indicated by the number of civic action groups forming.”

One such group is the Water Community Action Network (WaterCAN), a network of citizen activists, which recently warned that Johannesburg’s water woes could continue for years to come.

“The city has not allocated sufficient funding to the maintenance of decaying infrastructure and this crisis has been developing for many years,” WaterCAN’s director, Ferrial Adam, told The Citizen.

In May, South African voters made their discontent known at the country’s general election: the ruling African National Congress (ANC) lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since the end of apartheid in 1994.

What next?

It’s as yet unclear what the country’s new coalition government – formed of an unprecedented seven parties – might do to address these concerns, but it’s clear that decisive action will be required to fix the system and win back the trust of the electorate.

“For many parts of the country, the short-term solution is not complicated – the government must work with skilled engineers to monitor and fix the pipes and wipe out corruption and the mismanagement of public funds in the sector,” said Alicia Jooste, a senior programme officer at Amnesty International South Africa, in a recent op-ed.

“In the long term, all spheres of the state must allocate human, financial and political resources to develop and work on an integrated and sufficiently funded plan that safeguards this resource,” she continued.

There’s also a clear mandate for Johannesburg’s citizens – in particular, its more affluent ones – to cut down on their own water use, said Sheridan.

“The citizens of Cape Town were forced to face the possibility of the taps running dry permanently in 2018 during a five-year drought. Water consumption was drastically limited, forcing people to become very water conscious.

“This has to become the new normal if there is to be uninterrupted water supply.”