It is no secret that the province which contributes a third of national GDP is in the grip of a severe water crisis — and it is weighing heavily on business confidence.
It is crucial to understand why Gauteng is in this mess, and that while there is a way out, it will require political will and administrative drive — qualities that have eluded those who run the big cities in South Africa’s economic heartland.
At the heart of the thinking about water planning and use in Gauteng is the recognition that the province’s key cities are different to those of similar size elsewhere in the world. Most cities evolved over centuries around plentiful natural water sources. But, says Miriam Altman, convener for the Platform for a Water Secure Gauteng, “Gauteng and its cities were not built in the right place — as big cities are meant to be built on water courses. Instead they were built in Gauteng because of mining. And it is a magnet for in-migration, adding more pressure.” This is the first factor to consider when analysing the province’s water issues.
The platform Altman convenes is independent of the government, but works closely with the department of water & sanitation (DWS). It is an initiative linked to the World Bank Resource Management Group, of which South Africa is a member.
The second factor is that Gauteng has been growing exponentially, without government prioritising the infrastructure to accommodate this growth. The second phase of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project, intended to provide a substantial long-term reserve supply to back up the Vaal Dam, is now 10 years behind schedule. It was delayed during former water minister Nomvula Mokonyane’s tenure for a host of reasons, not all of them savoury. News24’s Carol Paton reported in April that after Mokonyane’s appointment to the post in 2014, there was “constant interference” in procurement and contracting for the project, resulting in long delays.
While the project is on track now, it will be completed only in 2028 — but experts warn that even then, Gauteng will continue to face water supply constraints due to demand and population growth.
This brings us to a third crucial factor. Gauteng uses too much water — an average of 280l per day, per person, when the global average is 173l. A huge campaign to shift behaviour in water usage is necessary — one similar to that implemented in Cape Town in 2018. Because of a severe drought in the Western Cape, a “day zero” was mooted when water would run out. Dramatic plans were put together, including the possibility of evacuating the city.
The result of the overusage in Gauteng is that Rand Water has been oversupplying the province by 10%, Altman says. Statistics from the DWS indicate that Rand Water is licensed to extract 4.1-billion litres from the Vaal River system daily, but the national government has allowed it to take 5.5-billion litres. This concession has been ended, mainly because 2.5-billion litres are lost in the system to leaks or nonpayment.
This reduction contributed to Joburg Water announcing level 2 and 3 water restrictions last week, and to the fact that some households are without water for up to 70 days at a time.
The problem is the collapsing water infrastructure in the province. To understand this collapse, which appears largely self-inflicted, we must go back to how utilities and water departments worked after they were first set up in the 1990s. They were run effectively in the first eight years after their establishment.
Gauteng is already at a disadvantage geographically, but this situation was worsened by poor decisions taken by politicians after 2010, to supplement city coffers and fund budget items outside those linked to essential services such as water and sanitation.
World-class standards
Immediately after 1994, water and sanitation departments were run merely as technical offices. The Joburg city council was fragmented, with “subcouncils” forming the bulk of it. Former city manager Ketso Gordhan tells the FM that part of his responsibility at the time was to create a fully fledged metro out of the subcouncils inherited from the former regime.
What he found was messy. To fully understand the working of the water department, he says, you needed 24 senior people in the room at the same time. One was responsible for water maintenance and another for billing. There were no balance sheets, no records of assets and liabilities.
We didn’t have a management team at the time to fix it. We brought in a global management contractor to run the entity for the first five years and get it off the ground,” says Gordhan.
— Ketso Gordhan
This dysfunction prompted the idea of creating a single entity, with a single CEO who would take full accountability for the provision of water in the city, in line with international practice, Gordhan says. This also went some way to addressing South Africa’s unique challenge — people simply not paying for water.
“We didn’t have a management team at the time to fix it. We brought in a global management contractor to run the entity for the first five years and get it off the ground,” says Gordhan. Thereafter local professionals were recruited and trained as the term of the original contract drew to a close. The new company was incentivised to reduce technical losses of water, and its major task was to create a utility with a single balance sheet, responsible for all aspects of water provision, maintenance and capital expenditure.
“It was a very standard thing in the developing world at the time,” he says.
Not everyone was amenable to Gordhan’s approach, especially on the Left of the tripartite alliance. Unions pushed back strongly, calling it the “privatisation” or “corporatisation” of water.
Water and sanitation consultant Neil Macleod, now working with the national government, ran the water department in eThekwini for 22 years. He tells the FM that in those first five years, Joburg Water had been built to world-class standards. “It had spare cash, every aspect of the business was on the up,” he says. Gordhan says Joburg Water had a surplus of about R800m by the time he left the council. It ran that way for a further four years.
Then politicians stepped in and did something that defies belief. They saw how well the water entity was run and decided to bring certain functions back into the broader city administration, including customer service and, crucially, billing. It was evidently hoped that this well-run operation would improve the city’s balance sheet.
In practice, the opposite happened. Billing was returned to the city, all functions were once again centralised and the council took any profits the entity made, leaving less and less for large capital projects and maintenance. For the standard South African politician, expenses on fancy ribbon-cuttings are sexier than laying water pipes.
“That is when the regression started,” Macleod says. “The city took the profits and these were used to prop up the rest of the [business] … customer service collapsed and asset maintenance went down … we have seen a repeat of this in other metros.”
It was certainly a memorable time — the outward manifestation of it was the billing crisis, which peaked in 2013. Who can forget when Nelson Mandela was issued with a R1m utility bill for his Houghton home? The story hit the headlines as far afield as France. The ANC’s headquarters, Luthuli House, was slapped with an incorrect R35m bill.
Service delivery began to collapse too, and the steady decline in assets under management by Joburg Water began. Revenue from water was no longer ring-fenced and used to manage water-related infrastructure. Instead, water entities were assigned budgets not necessarily linked to their requirements. Over and above this, the appointment of boards became politically influenced, aimed more at meeting patronage needs than providing water.
It was this monumental mistake by previous administrations which largely created today’s crisis. Nearly 50% of water in Gauteng is classified as nonrevenue, meaning it is lost through leaks or illegal water connections. Municipalities have failed to invest in building reservoirs and pump stations, which are now exposed as inadequate.
“Maintenance for water was underbudgeted and water entities did not have the incentive to be accountable,” says DWS director-general Sean Phillips. “Water utilities in effect became like technical offices.” They were in effect back to square one for Joburg and most cities, he says. eThekwini suffered a similar fate.
“Things worked [at first] because there was a single point of control for everything related to water. Political leaders decided to centralise, negating the benefit of setting up these entities, which now were no longer independent and self-financing,” Phillips says.
Under the changed system, Macleod says, supply chain management became centralised, making it a haven for corruption.
Not rocket science
The turnaround being implemented now represents a shift back to the systems implemented by Gordhan and Macleod.
Altman says that years of underinvestment in infrastructure spending and maintenance are beginning to bite. “Revenue went to the metro and was not earmarked to go to maintenance,” she says.
The year after Macleod left eThekwini in 2014, its water department was also reduced to simply functioning as a technical office. “There was one person accountable for water in eThekwini and that was me and that is how we ran it for 22 years,” he says. And eThekwini was globally recognised for its stellar water management. In 2014, it won the prestigious Stockholm Industry Water Award, yet the very next year the politicians departed from the successful model.
Macleod is trying to help six of the country’s nine metros to go back to what works. “The answer is simple: we know what works and we are trying to get back to that,” he says. “It will mean operating like the rest of the world.” Gordhan concurs: “This is fixable stuff, it’s not rocket science.”
Water & sanitation minister Pemmy Majodina briefed the media last month, saying measures have to be taken to avert a full-blown crisis in Gauteng. She described the situation in Gauteng as “self-inflicted” by the province’s municipalities, echoing a presentation she made to parliament’s portfolio committee on water last month. “What we are going through in Gauteng, and all 11 municipalities of Gauteng, is self-inflicted pain, where they were unable to do the necessary things — that is, to operate their reservoirs and water resources, as well as maintenance.”
In parliament, Majodina’s frustration with municipalities was palpable. She told MPs that after a number of meetings and warnings that the taps were running dry, the province was still “not doing the right thing”, adding that municipalities “don’t want to co-operate” in dealing with the crisis. “We met more than three times to check if there is change. Unfortunately ... there is no change in terms of Gauteng doing the right thing.”
Phillips, however, tells the FM that there has been improved co-operation from the province. It is an area in which Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi has been rather quiet — usually front and centre of any Gauteng-linked crisis, he has largely left the province’s water woes to his MECs and municipal leadership. Water is a municipal and national competence, but the approach he has adopted is out of kilter with his governance style. This is very likely a political decision. Water is set to become a crucial issue ahead of the 2026 local government election, if the crisis is not managed now and if interventions by the government fail to drive down demand.
Macleod says two of the three metros in Gauteng have agreed to go back to the system that works. “The council has now agreed to put Joburg Water back to what it was. They could have done it two years ago, but they didn’t. The mantra is to re-establish the business units, have one person accountable for human resources, finance, IT. When there is a problem, you then don’t have a tennis match to determine who and what is to blame.”
Still, it’s risky business to revert to a system that worked for customers but appeared not to work for certain politicians.
Macleod helped both Buffalo City (East London) in the Eastern Cape and the Mangaung metro (Bloemfontein) in the Free State to develop a plan for a single accountable utility or department, and the consequences were dramatic for the officials who drove those projects. He tells the FM that the individual in charge in Buffalo City was assassinated last December. Last month, the same thing happened to a key member of the team in Mangaung. “It shows how much is at stake here,” he says.
So far, six metros are on board to make the shift, including Joburg and Tshwane. But Ekurhuleni and Nelson Mandela Bay have resisted efforts by the national government to get them to change. It may be more than coincidence that the water departments in these two metros have EFF MMCs in charge.
Phillips describes the readiness of some councils to make the shift as a “green shoot”.
Cities are set to receive support from the National Treasury to develop turnaround strategies for water provision. A crucial shift in the intervention is that the Treasury has changed its previous position, which was that water sales should not be ring-fenced. The department holding the national purse strings is now open to allowing a single point of accountability for water in municipalities across the country. The Treasury will give financial help to councils which provide workable turnaround strategies, but many will be finalised only by mid-2025.
The City of Tshwane is slightly ahead. It adopted a new strategy with the Treasury’s help under former mayor Cilliers Brink; the strategy was developed and adopted by the council in July.
Meanwhile, in Cape Town
As Gauteng braces for water shortages, Cape Town is quietly securing water supply for the country’s fastest-growing metro, with the largest water reclamation project in the world already in motion, mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis tells the FM. Due to climate change and rapid population growth, the city is vulnerable to natural events such as the “once in 500 years” drought it faced in 2018.
To keep on top of the situation, Cape Town has adopted an ambitious plan to reduce its reliance on rainwater.
“When we came out of day zero, we had to make provision for a permanent reduction in our reliance on rain. We have a three-pronged project,” says Hill-Lewis. The first step, a groundwater aquifer, has been completed.
The second, the reclamation of water through a state-of-the-art treatment plant, is under way. The new technology is set to produce clean drinking water which Hill-Lewis describes as “cleaner than Evian”. Still, after treatment, it will be pumped back into the reservoirs to undergo the routine treatment process.
The third prong, desalination of seawater, which is the most expensive and environmentally unfriendly, will start in 2028. Once it is completed, a third of the city’s water will come from nonrain sources. Hill-Lewis says the population of Cape Town has now surpassed that of Joburg, and the city is home to a half a million more people than during the 2018 crisis.
The initiatives now taking shape across Gauteng are largely long term and will take time to implement — the water situation will remain tight over the medium term. The original Lesotho Highlands Water Project scheme also recently closed for maintenance until February, further tightening supply to the province.
There are many lessons Gauteng’s ailing metros can learn from Cape Town, including its commitment to infrastructure maintenance and construction, and the way it radically changed water behaviour among residents during the 2018 drought — without implementing water restrictions.
Hill-Lewis says the communication campaign in 2018 was so effective that demand and usage never returned to the levels seen before the rollout of the campaign. It involved a range of mechanisms, including publicly naming the worst offenders and setting up weekly “dashboards” of water usage — which remain among the most visited websites to this day, as residents “got into the habit of good consumption”.
Hill-Lewis has been approached by mayors from as far afield as Mexico, where they adopted Cape Town’s entire communication strategy to drive down demand — they simply translated the plan into Spanish. He says he has yet to hear from his Gauteng counterparts.
But Phillips says work is under way to roll out a similar campaign in Gauteng early next year, to be driven by former Cape Town water official Gisela Kaiser. The government has been urged to be “more transparent” about the water situation to bring about behaviour change. Kaiser is working with Altman at the Platform for a Water Secure Gauteng.
While the government is directly responsible for Gauteng’s water woes, the severity of the crisis will be determined by whether consumers change their behaviour and begin to use water sparingly. “Alongside everything else, the big missing piece is a society-wide campaign like Cape Town’s day zero campaign … it is hard to resolve a problem without taking along the users or consumers,” Altman says. The platform is raising R25m for the campaign. A dashboard is already up on the national water department website, which provides detailed information on water consumption.
It appears the national government, working with municipalities, may be having some success. However, a presentation by Rand Water to parliament last month was sobering. Senior management told parliament’s portfolio committee on water & sanitation that it had had 46 meetings with leadership at all levels in Gauteng, without results.
Rand Water chair Ramateu Monyokolo told the committee that municipalities had to take responsibility for leaks, citing Tshwane as an example. When that city got officials to “walk their lines” to identify leaks, they were able to drastically reduce nonrevenue water usage. Leaks led to a “phantom demand” for water, Rand Water CEO Sipho Mosai told the committee.
After the parliamentary hearing, urgently convened to assess the water situation in Gauteng, the committee expressed concern. “Municipalities are not coming to the party in playing their critical role in the water value chain, which requires an effective and efficient system from source to tap. It is unacceptable that Rand Water has had to bear the brunt of municipal inadequacies,” said committee chair Leon Basson.
The major concern for the committee was the sheer magnitude of the water waste in the system. Nonrevenue water usage in the province stands at 49.2%, with huge losses of treated water caused by leaks resulting from unmaintained infrastructure.
The committee was also worried about water boards not being paid for services by municipalities, but welcomed Rand Water’s commitment to ensuring a stable supply of water to them and to working with municipalities to resolve the crisis.
“Gauteng plays a critical role in the economic wellbeing of the country and water plays an essential socioeconomic role. Thus the current risks must be mitigated to prevent complete collapse of the system,” Basson said.
The writing is on the wall for Gauteng municipalities regarding water supply management. If electricity was the main determinant of how South Africans voted in 2021, water is set to replace it as the big issue in the 2026 local government election — especially if reforms pushed by the national government fail to gain support and traction at local level in the run-up to the polls.
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