MALAIKA MAHLATSI | Disinformation campaign by politicians amid Gauteng water crisis

Over the past few weeks, the richest and most populous province in SA has been experiencing severe water outages. Johannesburg, the richest city in the country, has been hardest hit, with some suburbs and townships experiencing multi-day outages that have brought households and businesses to their knees. Protests have been happening across the province.

While they are less violent than the devastating scenes that we witnessed in Westbury and Coronationville in September when police fired rubber bullets, tear gas and stun grenades at residents protesting weeks-long water outages, they are not less concerning. Many explanations have been given by government officials about the cause of the ongoing crisis, but two in particular demand reflection. The first and most cited explanation is that the province has consumption levels that are far above the national average.

This is true, but not for the reasons that people have been led by municipal authorities to believe. The argument about high levels of consumption is curiously framed as a question of residents using more water than is available. And indeed, consumption in Johannesburg, particularly, is more than 300 litres per person per day, which is well above the 237-litre national average and the 173-litre global average.

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But direct human consumption is not the main cause of the crisis. The main driver of this high consumption figure is non-revenue water. Around 46% of the water in Johannesburg is lost within the municipal system before reaching the consumer.

About 32.9% to 35% of this water is physically lost through leaks and ageing infrastructure, while the remainder is attributed to commercial losses such as illegal connections, meter inaccuracies and theft. The high number of pipe bursts in the city amounts to more than 4,500 a month, with about 575 megalitres of water lost weekly. This is an indication of severe infrastructure degradation — one that has a devastating impact on municipal revenue.

The city is haemorrhaging about R7bn annually in lost revenue and water losses, constraining resources for public services, including water infrastructure. The second explanation that officials have been giving pertains to the recent explosion of a motor connected to one of the pumps at the Zuikerbosch water treatment plant that is managed by Rand Water. As a result of the incident, the system experienced a loss of 1,800 megalitres a day.

Within 24 hours, the bulk water utility had recovered 1,400 megalitres. The incident affected reservoirs within the Palmiet, Eikenhof and Mapleton systems, but if municipalities in Gauteng had proper water governance systems, the situation would have been far less severe.

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