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By Jordan King
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Johannesburg is in the throes of a crisis where people are sometimes more than a week without running water, and Newsweek has spoken to local supply researchers and engineers to explain why.
Johannesburg, home to roughly 6.2 million people, is struggling with “severely constrained systems,” with authorities proposing new restrictions last week, including implementing supply cuts in certain areas. The issue has gone viral on social media, with an X post by Polymarket about the crisis garnering 8 million views as of Tuesday.
South Africans’ daily lives are being impacted drastically by water shortages. One woman, 59-year-old Sharlene Smith, spoke to Bloomberg about how the crisis forces her to cross a dangerous area enveloped in gang violence to try and fetch water from a church or a mosque to take back to her elderly mother. Businesses are also suffering, with a coffee shop owner telling local outlet The Star that he spends an entire day’s profit on refilling his backup tank.
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It comes as South Africans go to the polls to vote in their local elections this week, putting service delivery at the center of the country’s focus.
“There is a lot of water in our dams,” Craig Sheridan, a professor who leads water research at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, told Newsweek. “The problem is the major constraints in getting that water from the dams, through the system, to people's taps.”
He argued that pipes, reservoirs and water towers, which provide storage, have not been maintained while demand has grown while the city nears “the limit of the water available for a population of this size.”
Mike Muller, the former director general of water affairs in South Africa, told Newsweek that "Johannesburg and surrounding cities are not running out of water—the region's dams are full, and the summer rains have hardly started.”
He added: “But Johannesburg's distribution network has been badly neglected for the past few decades and is losing to leaks more than 30 percent of the water that's supplied.”
Johannesburg Mayor Dada Morero addressed reporters about the crisis on Monday, saying that Johannesburg’s "reservoirs have struggled to recover because water is being used faster than reservoirs and towers can refill.” He also blamed “labor action” for “delayed interventions,” likely referring to previous union action over wages.
He acknowledged the impact of the shortages, saying: “Residents are now in their second week of disruption, and some households have had dry taps for more than 10 days."
Morero said the city’s supplier, Johannesburg Water, was planning to acquire and use its own water tanker fleet of trucks to deliver water to informal settlements, neighborhoods of makeshift homes that surround the city. He also said water storage levels had risen from 37 percent on Monday to 41 percent on Tuesday.
When Newsweek contacted the mayor’s office for comment, it was directed to Morero’s speech. Newsweek has reached out to Johannesburg Water, via email, for comment.
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Johannesburg’s Water Crisis Explained
Johannesburg is one of the few major industrial cities in the world that is not on a river—its supply chain moves water from dams through treatment plants before it reaches pumping stations and municipal storage to eventually be used in homes.
Sheridan argued that “maintenance of the network has been negligible” with “thousands of kilometres of pipes that are not being maintained to global norms” while reservoirs and water towers have been left “leaky.”
“We are now in the awful position where the maintenance backlog far exceeds any available budget, so we are essentially playing maintenance whack-a-mole,” he said.
Sheridan added that the city also has “real supply constraints right now,” with the next supplying dam set to be usable in 2028 or 2029. “And even then, it will probably be the last big dam we can build, in South Africa or in our neighbouring countries, mainly because there is very little space left for large dams,” he said.
All of this, along with the country’s growing population, “adds up to a very complicated, intersecting system that has created a perfect storm, which is why people don't have water.”
Geography Associate Professor Anja du Plessis, of the University of South Africa, also told Newsweek that “sufficient water exists,” there are just large amounts of it getting lost through leaks while power outages, common in South Africa, interrupt the pumping needed to move the water through the system.
“The test is to follow the water: if bulk supply is normal but reservoirs do not refill, the fault lies in the network,” she said. “Current evidence points to systemic failure, poor governance and decision-making on a local government level rather than scarcity.”
In a statement last week, Johannesburg Water acknowledged leaks and the need for infrastructure repairs, but stressed high demand, arguing that high usage drains water reservoirs faster than they can refill.
What Is the Answer?
Johannesburg has been under “Level 1” water restrictions since September, which bans people from watering gardens or filling swimming pools during certain hours, and they cannot use hoses to wash paved areas and driveways.
These rules are set to stay in place until March 31, but Johannesburg Water proposed stricter restrictions last week, including mandatory spray nozzles on hoses, stopping the irrigation of city-managed parks and using treated wastewater instead of drinking water for things like road construction.
In areas where consumption is particularly high, targeted supply reductions could be introduced. These “Level 2” restrictions have not yet been implemented—Johannesburg Water said they would be used if demand continued to rise with leak detection.
Sheridan argued that the first priority should be maintenance to reduce leaks, which he estimates would provide 30-40 percent more water than the city currently has. “The task is monumental, but in the same way that you eat an elephant, one mouthful at a time, we have to start,” he said.
He also called on citizens to help save water and for a review of the city’s billing and tariff systems, so “people are prepared to pay for the water they consume” and are ultimately incentivised to “drive consumption down.”
However, Sheridan added: “That's really difficult when a huge amount of water is flowing down the road from a leaking pipe, and people get quite agitated about that, so tariff revisions have to go hand in hand with fixing the leaks.”
Part of the city’s management issue is that Johannesburg has faced the challenges that come with coalition governance, as it has not seen single-party rule since African National Congress (ANC) lost its majority in 2016.
“We are in an extremely unstable political phase that generally translates into exceptionally poor maintenance,” Sheridan said.
But the issue and its widespread fallout have been a major one for all parties campaigning for this week’s elections.
“The priority is to fix the city's leaking pipes,” Muller said. “That's now recognized as the priority by all major political parties. So that will be the agenda for the next city administration.”
Meanwhile, Johannesburg Water said on its website that it "continues to undertake leak detection, burst pipe repairs, pressure management and infrastructure rehabilitation to reduce water losses and improve system performance."
It added: "Johannesburg Water urges residents and businesses to reduce water consumption and avoid non-essential water use to support system recovery."
Contact Newsweek editors for this story: Ben Kelly and Anthony Murray.
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