Water Crisis Fuels Voter Anger In Johannesburg As Wealthy Residents Go Off-Grid

Johannesburg is losing more than a third of its water supply, an estimated 655 million litres a day, to burst pipes, leaving residents across the city grappling with dry taps as South Africa heads toward local elections expected by November. The crisis has become a flashpoint for public frustration with municipal failures, eroding support for the ruling African National Congress.

In Hillbrow, 17-year-old student Thandani Masangu described the toll of the shortage after spending three hours pushing empty containers on a trolley through the neighbourhood in search of water. His apartment block has gone without running water for more than three years. He and his friend Raymond Maleka recently found a municipal tanker refilling a nearby tank, only to be told by a security guard that the supply was reserved for residents of the adjacent building.

Johannesburg Water, the municipally owned utility responsible for the system, acknowledges the scale of the problem. Senior manager for innovation and technology Zakhele Khuzwayo said much of the city’s infrastructure is more than 50 years old, and while officials know the improvements needed, implementation remains a work in progress.

Experts say the issue has been worsened by years of underinvestment in maintenance. Craig Sheridan, director of the Centre in Water Research and Development at the University of the Witwatersrand, who compiled the data on the city’s pipe losses, noted that maintenance spending is often deprioritised in favour of more visible projects, a pattern he said extends across the city’s public infrastructure. Climate change is compounding the problem, with analysts pointing to rising water loss through evaporation.

Underlying the infrastructure woes is a deepening budget crisis at the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality, which accounts for more than a sixth of South Africa’s GDP. In July, the National Treasury withheld funding from the city after repeated failures to meet financial management standards, declaring its latest 97.1 billion rand ($6 billion) budget unfunded due to spending, including wage increases, that outpaces realistic revenue. A spokesperson for Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero did not respond to a request for comment, though Morero was reported last month attributing unpaid debts to payment system glitches.

The ANC has felt the political cost of service delivery failures before. In the 2021 local elections, public frustration pushed the party’s share of the vote below 50 percent for the first time since apartheid ended, a decline that foreshadowed its loss of a national majority less than three years later. Maleka, who will be eligible to vote this year, said he will not be backing the ANC, a sentiment shared by 53-year-old Lindiwe Ndlovu, a former party member whose Hillbrow flat relies on tanker deliveries. Ndlovu and several neighbours said they were cut off from the water supply in 2019 over a billing dispute involving a broken meter that was never repaired, despite a court order in May directing the utility to restore their service, which has yet to happen.

Meanwhile, wealthier residents in the suburbs are increasingly bypassing the municipal system altogether, drilling boreholes alongside the solar panels and private waste collection contracts many already use to work around power and service failures. Albertus Lombaard of the Borehole Water Association estimates that Gauteng province, home to both Johannesburg and Pretoria, has seen roughly 10,000 boreholes drilled over the past decade. Litigation lawyer Thea Kilian said she spent 100,000 rand installing a borehole, tanks and filters after a particularly disruptive shutdown, a setup that now keeps her pool filled and garden green. While she said she feels for those still struggling with the shortages, she admitted the crisis “doesn’t bother me at all anymore.”