By Tim Cocks<\/p>\n
JOHANNESBURG, Aug 11 (Reuters) – Dry taps have become a daily frustration for residents of Johannesburg, a city haemorrhaging more than a third of its water supply, or an estimated 655 million litres (173 million gallons) a day, through burst pipes.<\/p>\n
“I feel really broken,” 17-year-old student Thandani Masangu said after spending three hours wheeling \u200cempty containers on a trolley through the peeling and trash-strewn urban neighbourhood of Hillbrow searching for water.<\/p>\n
His block has had none for more than three years.<\/p>\n
Masangu and his \u200cfriend Raymond Maleka spotted a tank being refilled by a municipal water truck; a security guard told them there was only enough for residents of the adjacent tower-block.<\/p>\n
As South Africa prepares for local elections expected by November, water shortages have \u200bbecome a symbol of municipal failures that have angered voters and eroded support for the ruling African National Congress.<\/p>\n
Wealthier inhabitants of the commercial capital are increasingly taking matters into their own hands: drilling boreholes to bypass the municipality, starving it of funds needed to fix the mess.<\/p>\n
‘THE INFRASTRUCTURE IS OLD’<\/p>\n
Johannesburg Water, the utility owned and run by the local authority, acknowledges there is a problem.<\/p>\n
“The infrastructure is old. A lot of it is more than 50 years old,” its senior manager for innovation and technology, Zakhele Khuzwayo, told Reuters in an interview.<\/p>\n
“The city are aware of the limitations. We know where we’d like \u200cto be … Now it’s a matter of paving the way to get \u2060there.”<\/p>\n
That acknowledgement, and the regular promises of progress, have done little to stop the once mundane issue of maintenance rising up the list of electoral grievances.<\/p>\n
“Maintenance is not sexy. It’s always more interesting to allocate funds to other areas,” Craig Sheridan, director and founder of the Centre in Water Research \u2060and Development at the city’s University of the Witwatersrand, told Reuters.<\/p>\n
“This is not only evident in our water … we see it in all our public infrastructure,” added Sheridan, who collected the data on the city’s haemorrhaging pipes.<\/p>\n
Analysts say climate change is worsening the city’s water woes by increasing the amount lost to evaporation.<\/p>\n
Another underlying problem is the mounting budgetary crisis at the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality.<\/p>\n
In July, the National Treasury withheld \u200bfunding \u200bfrom Johannesburg, a city that makes up more than a sixth of the country’s GDP, after several failures to \u200bmeet financial management requirements.<\/p>\n
It has said the city’s latest 97.1 billion rand ($6 \u200cbillion) budget is unfunded, with planned spending, including higher municipal wages, exceeding realistic revenue projections.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for Johannesburg mayor Dada Morero did not respond to an emailed request for comment on the problems with water supplies and the broader budget. Last month, national press quoted Morero as attributing unpaid debts to system glitches that disrupted payments.<\/p>\n
‘WE’RE OVERWHELMED, TO BE HONEST’<\/p>\n
The ruling ANC has paid the price for poor services in the past. In local elections in 2021, public anger lowered its share of the vote to under half for the first time since the end of apartheid \u2014 and it went on to lose its majority in national polls less than three years later.<\/p>\n
Masangu’s friend Maleka will be old enough to vote in this year’s polls, and said he won’t be choosing \u200cthe ANC.<\/p>\n
Neither will Lindiwe Ndlovu, 53, former ANC member and owner of a flat in the Hillbrow high \u200brise being supplied by the tanker.<\/p>\n
Ndlovu and three other residents said authorities cut them off in 2019 for non-payment. But \u200bthey said the utility was using excessive estimates \u2014 a meter to determine actual usage \u200bwas broken and never replaced, despite repeated promises.<\/p>\n
A court had ordered the utility to restore the water in May, but they had not yet done so, \u200cthey added.<\/p>\n
“People are tired of these problems,” Ndlovu said. Johannesburg Water’s Zakhele \u200bKhuzwayo said he could not comment on individual cases. “We’re \u200boverwhelmed, to be honest.”<\/p>\n
Out in the suburbs, richer residents have been drilling boreholes alongside the solar panels they set up to cope with power cuts, and the contracts they signed with private recycling collectors.<\/p>\n
Albertus Lombaard of the Borehole Water Association estimates that residents of Gauteng province, which includes Johannesburg and the capital Pretoria, have drilled 10,000 boreholes over the \u200bpast decade.<\/p>\n
Litigation lawyer Thea Kilian said that after one particularly frustrating \u200cshutdown, she spent 100,000 rand to drill, and to install tanks and filters that now kept her swimming pool full and her lawn green.<\/p>\n
“On our WhatsApp group for \u200bthe street, you get constant … reports of water problems,” the 53-year-old said.<\/p>\n
She felt awful for those less fortunate, but “it’s a terrible thing to say, (the water problem) doesn’t \u200bbother me at all anymore”.<\/p>\n
(Additional reporting by Siyabonga Sishi; Editing by Andrei Khalip and Andrew Heavens)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Tim Cocks JOHANNESBURG, Aug 11 (Reuters) – Dry taps have become a daily frustration for residents of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":163524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[52574,17,52573,1492,52570,52575,36031,52572,52571,4052,30870,1767],"class_list":["post-163523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-canada","tag-african-national-congress","tag-canada","tag-city-of-johannesburg","tag-infrastructure","tag-johannesburg","tag-lindiwe-ndlovu","tag-municipal-water","tag-raymond-maleka","tag-thandani-masangu","tag-water","tag-water-shortages","tag-water-supply"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=163523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/163523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/163524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=163523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=163523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=163523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}