The City of Johannesburg has been thrust into massive water woes in recent years with the latest stint seeing the economic capital suburbs with dry taps for weeks.
About a month ago, the majority of Joburg's households had to scramble to access water for about 14 days after a power outage at the Eikenhof pump station that caused immediate water outages in the city.
Besides that incident, the City of Gold has had many outages before, with some saying it is due to to damaged and poorly maintained infrastructure.
A breakdown in basic services has more than 5 million residents living in Johannesburg unsure what the cause is.
Analysts have asserted that historically, corruption scandals, record unemployment and infrastructure failure, including load shedding, were among the causes of the water woes.
Recently The Star, Saturday Star sister newspaper, reported that the City has had to resort to water shedding.
This means the metro has to shut down water in some areas of the city at different times.
While City officials are scrambling to solve the water problem the metro is facing, Jo’burg mayor Kabelo Gwamanda has denied that there is a water crisis.
He has been on record blaming the high demand of water due to the growing population and load shedding, or natural disasters.
However, experts have maintained that the problems stem mainly from unmaintained infrastructure, including broken pipes, as well as electrical outages at pump stations.
The Star previously reported that it could take up to 10 years to resolve the water problems that have rocked the country’s economic capital in recent years.
Non-profit-organisation WaterCan has repeatedly warned that the ageing infrastructure and leaks were the main instigator of water shortages in the city.
The NPO reportedly said the metro was losing up to 44% of its fresh drinking water, with 25% being lost to leaks.
Gwamanda admitted that the City had a long-standing issue of ageing infrastructure, saying it was not necessarily damaged, but aged.
He said the City had come up with a 10-year plan to assess the infrastructure across it.
“We have a 10-year plan, whereby we start assessing our infrastructure across the board so that we can have scientific evidence on how we are going to deploy our resources.
“This would simply mean that it would assist us to distinguish between what infrastructure requires to be replaced and which one requires refurbishment… so that we can be able to deploy our financial resources accordingly.”
He said he did not see that there was a long-term problem, because the City got its water supply directly from Rand Water. They paid for this service on a monthly basis.
Gwamanda added that the City was looking to invest in its own water purification system as an alternative for whenever there are issues with Rand Water.
However, executive manager at WaterCAN, Dr Ferrial Adam, argued that the City did not have a handle on the water problems. Reports were rife that some parts of the city were still struggling with the supply of pressured water.
“It might be that it could be isolated to saying that there had been a lightning strike. The fact here is that Rand Water and the City of Joburg are not talking adequately to people… and we don’t know what’s happening, and I think that they don’t have a handle on the issue. And what concerns me is if this continues this way, they are going to lose track of everything, and then it’s going to be worse,” Adam said.
Saturday Star