Johannesburg is “fast approaching Day Zero” and the City of Johannesburg and its mayor, Dada Morero, have not done enough to communicate that urgency to residents.
This was the warning from Malebo Kobe, a member of the parliamentary portfolio committee on water and sanitation, where Morero appeared on Friday to explain his plans to tackle the city’s worsening water crisis.
“Just last week, the mayor promised the residents of Coronationville and Westbury that they will receive water in seven days,” Kobe told the virtual meeting. “That hasn’t happened yet. I would like an explanation from the mayor on why he would make such a promise, especially given that our issues are so complex.
“We know that the issues of infrastructure are much more prolonged than that; they are protracted in nature and you can’t make short-term promises.”
This was a huge concern for her. “It shows that we have a problem with communicating the realities to our people.”
The mayor has since revised his seven-day restoration deadline to three weeks.
In response, Morero said his seven-day restoration promise was to “provide hope” and signify leadership to these communities. “When we went to Westbury seven days ago, there was absolutely no water, which meant certain interventions had to be taken by the leadership of the city and decisive decisions had to be made.
“Out of the decisions we made was that in seven days we should ensure that the broader part of the area receives water. That’s a commitment that the government should be able to make, which means working with Johannesburg Water to ensure that water is supplied.
“A day after we left the area, we started realising an improvement as far as the supply of water in the area. Between the seven days that we have committed, there was a lot of improvement and that was experienced by the communities.”
Morero said that on Thursday, in a public meeting with residents from Westbury and Coronationville, “they did confirm that indeed improvements were witnessed. That is why there were no more protests in the area, precisely because leadership had confronted the problem and brought about solutions in the area …”
“We had to make certain decisions to ensure that we push our departments and our entities to respond … It was an important statement to have been made by the executive mayor, otherwise leadership can’t just sit and not make decisive decisions.”
Regarding Kobe’s statement on the city fast approaching Day Zero, Morero said that with summer approaching, “we are going to see high consumption” and “therefore we have to implement certain measures including level one restrictions to ensure that we can push consumption down”. He added that Johannesburg Water does communicate on a daily basis with residents.
Sufficient water being provided
The underlying causes of the water supply disruptions that are being experienced in Gauteng, in Johannesburg in particular, is that the demand for treated water from Rand Water by provincial municipalities is now sometimes exceeding the available supply, said Sean Phillips, the director-general of the department of water and sanitation.
“The demand supply relationship is very tight. This makes the system vulnerable to disruptions and when such disruptions occur, it takes a very long time for the water levels in the reservoirs to recover.”
Rand Water is supplying sufficient water to Gauteng municipalities to meet their needs, he said. “If they were to reduce the leaks in their distribution systems and invest more in their distribution infrastructure, including storage and pumping capacity.
All the municipalities in Gauteng need to focus on reducing their leaks. “The leaks, on average in the Gauteng municipalities, are about 33%, including in Johannesburg. That means that about a third of the water that they obtain from Rand Water is lost through leaks in the distribution system.”
Municipalities also need to invest in their distribution infrastructure, including storage and pumping capacity, so that their distribution systems are more resilient and not so prone to water supply disruption such as electrical supply disruption, “which will always occur”.
Institutional reform is required, Phillips said. The council of the City of Johannesburg has approved a water and sanitation turnaround plan, as required by the treasury’s reform of metropolitan trading services programme.
“We’ve assessed that plan, we think that it’s a very good quality turnaround plan, it’s appropriate, it contains everything that needs to be done to address the situation. And, if the plan is implemented, it will result in the required improvement in water and sanitation service delivery in the city,” he said.
The plan includes measures to improve operations and maintenance, including in improving leak repair as well as ambitious plans for capital investment in municipal distribution infrastructure, including the required additional storage and pumping capacity.
“We were very encouraged that Johannesburg Water was allocated an increased budget by the city to implement the plan and that it appointed contractors to work on the key projects related to strengthening the distribution infrastructure in the city.
“However, we are concerned that many of the projects have since come to a halt, and some of the contractors have stopped work or left the site because they have not been paid by Johannesburg Water. This is because Johannesburg Water does not have the money to pay them because part of its budget has been swept from its account by the city and not put back.”
R4 billion siphoned away
Stephen Moore, a member of the parliamentary portfolio committee, questioned Morero on media reports and Morero’s own comments that refer to an amount of R4 billion that was taken from Johannesburg Water and siphoned into municipal coffers “at this critical time when the city is facing a water crisis”.
“Please can you elaborate on why it was taken from Johannesburg Water and specifically what other expenses were deemed more important than communities without water for weeks at a time? Under what mechanism was the money reallocated?”
Moore referred to Johannesburg Water’s annual report of 2023-24, which indicated that cash flow restrictions in the city affected the entity’s ability to pay creditors on time. “As of 30 June 2024, creditors totalling R1.1 billion were not paid due to these restrictions. This cash flow restriction has had a direct impact on communities including the Commando system where the Brixton tower and reservoir project was all due to be completed in April.
“I was on site at the end of August and they say they’ve failed to be paid again, so they downed tools again. So this critical project that is aimed at assisting the Commando system is down again. Why are there currently problems in the City of Johannesburg with paying contractors and is this directly linked to the money taken away from the City of Johannesburg’s accounts.”
He said he understood that a partial payment on this item had been made “but that doesn’t account for why they weren’t paid in the first place”.
“I’ve looked through Johannesburg Water’s plans to turn this situation around and I’m confident that given the resources, Johannesburg Water is capable of addressing this crisis,” Moore said. “However, looking at the medium term budget framework for the next three years, the allocation is insufficient to turn around the city’s problems in the short term.
He said that less than R2 billion is allocated a year for the next three years while the entity needs about R3.2 billion a year “to start rectifying the neglect”.
“In fact, in the current year, the budget is only around R1.7 billion, which is an increase from R1.2 billion but it shows how little priority this issue has had historically. Even now it’s barely more than half of what is required to actually turn around the issue.”
To properly maintain the city’s 12 000km of water reticulation one needs to be repairing 240km to 300km of pipes every single year. “In the current budget you’re only intending to replace 85km of pipeline.”
Moore asked Morero to explain whether the turnaround plan would really assist in getting Johannesburg out of this crisis “or whether this plan is similar to your promises to the residents of the Commando system of a permanent solution within a week and now that that time is up you’re going to come back and say you need more time and more promises”.
Morero said that with the service entity reforms that the city has entered into with the treasury, they are “beginning to rearrange how we are financing entities and how we are financing infrastructure in the metro of Johannesburg”. This involves ring-fencing some revenue from water and electricity to reinvest it into those services.
He acknowledged that the city was unable to pay all its contractors on time. “We’ve got a war room that sits every Sunday to determine how best we can deal with payment of our suppliers. We are alive to the fact that our expenditure has actually exceeded our income.”
That the city was not allowing contractors to be paid was “digging us into a worse situation”, Moore said. “He [Morero] talks about pushing level one restrictions. Those water restrictions have been in place for over a decade, and are nothing new … Demand is going to rise with the summer heat.”
He said Johannesburg Water is doing an admirable job of trying to throttle and balance water for residents but not succeeding “and it’s only going to get hotter in Gauteng, which means that there’s going to be less water, higher demand and the same amount of supply. More people are going to be without water.
“The communities like Westbury and Coronationville and Sophiatown and Ebony Park and Bruma are going to go without water again. One has to question what problems exist in the background that are preventing the city from actually tackling this crisis properly and whether the right hands are behind the wheel.”
Morero said: “On the payment of contractors, we are doing that. We will check how many are outstanding, especially on critical projects with Johannesburg Water and we will prioritise those.”
He explained that after paying salaries, medical aid and its bulk purchases such as water and electricity while contractors were third in line. “We will go back and look at what is the pressure point at Johannesburg Water and prioritise those so that we can pay them immediately.”
This did not satisfy Leon Basson, the chairperson of the portfolio committee. “That means that contractors will stand last in a row. It doesn’t matter whether they go bankrupt because you are not prioritising them, you’ve signed a contract with them … You will pay them within 30 days, or when they give their letter.
“But then you take a decision as the metro to pay them when you’ve got cash. That is unacceptable and I will ask national treasury and the auditor general to investigate this because you are setting up contractors for failure that you’ve appointed.”
Basson said that Morero had not answered his question on when the R4 billion “that you have taken” and “when are you going to pay that back”.
“Surely with the crisis you have, it’s a council resolution. I’ve been a councillor for 18 and a half years in the municipality. I know how it works. You take that to your council. You ringfence that. It is not rocket science.
“You are not serious about the problem of the water in Johannesburg. And you need to come out clear how you are going to deal with it. I want dates from you, don’t tell me what you are going to do in future. I need to know when you are going to do this.”
Morero said he would ringfence the percentages that need to be reinvested into the city’s entities, like Johannesburg Water, at a “pace and scale that the city can afford”.
With Johannesburg said to be fast approaching ‘Day Zero’, the mayor was also questioned about missing funds
