The promises are ambitious. The taps, however, keep running dry.
Residents of Johannesburg and Randburg endured a punishing cycle of water outages throughout 2025 – disruptions stretching from hours into days, and in some cases weeks. This is not simply a story of bad infrastructure or unfortunate timing. It is the visible consequence of decades of neglect, governance failures, and a growing gulf between the promises made at the highest levels of government and the reality experienced at street level.
On the evening of his 2026 State of the Nation Address, residents of Parktown West had just ended a march on Jan Smuts Avenue after enduring 20 days without water, with some households forced to spend up to R16,000 to fill water tanks. It was a pointed backdrop for a president about to speak to the nation.
A Year of Outages
The disruptions hitting Johannesburg and Randburg have followed a relentless pattern throughout 2025, driven primarily by maintenance on ageing bulk water infrastructure. Johannesburg residents endured a 21-day outage beginning 30 June as Rand Water embarked on extensive maintenance, affecting Randburg, Hursthill, Brixton, Crosby and various Lenasia systems. Then in December, two major pumping stations – Zuikerbosch and Eikenhof – were shut down in phases over the festive season, leaving residents across Johannesburg and Randburg facing reduced pressure, intermittent supply, and full outages in higher-lying areas.
Water tankers were deployed as a stopgap, but relief was widely criticised as slow and inadequate. Joburg Water warned that system recovery could take five to fourteen days after maintenance concluded. For residents who had lived through multiple multi-day outages in a single year, the distinction between planned maintenance and a failing system had become academic.
What the President Promised
On 12 February 2026, as Joburg residents were still refilling emergency tanks, President Cyril Ramaphosa delivered his State of the Nation Address. He acknowledged the crisis with unusual directness.
“It is impossible to live without water and it is impossible for the economy to grow without water. We are therefore taking a series of decisive actions to resolve the water crisis, to enable our people to get water where they live, whether in townships or rural areas. We are investing heavily in expanding our water resources,” Ramaphosa told parliament.
He pointed to R23 billion secured through the Infrastructure Fund for seven large water projects, and confirmed that the Polihlali Dam – part of Phase 2 of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project – would feed 490 million cubic metres of water a year into the Vaal River System, securing supply to Gauteng and several other provinces. Work on the Ntabelanga Dam on the uMzimvubu River was also announced as underway.
Ramaphosa also made a commitment directly relevant to cities like Johannesburg: starting this year, government would work with municipalities to establish professionally managed, ring-fenced utilities for water and electricity services – an implicit acknowledgement that the current municipal model is not working.
On the National Water Resource Infrastructure Agency, promised as a priority in previous addresses, Ramaphosa again committed to completing its establishment “within the next year.” It is a deadline that has now rolled over from one SONA to the next, the agency still without a board and not yet a functional legal entity.
What the Auditor-General Found
The gap between presidential promise and municipal delivery has been laid bare in damning detail by Auditor-General Tsakani Maluleke. Her December 2025 report, “Source to Supply: A Shared Responsibility for a Water-Resilient Future,” audited South Africa’s water value chain for 2023-24 and found systemic failure at every level.
Of 135 Water Service Authorities audited, only 17% achieved clean audits. Maintenance has been catastrophically neglected – 96% of authorities spent less than the National Treasury’s recommended 8% of asset value on repairs, averaging just 3%. The result: disclosed water losses totalling R14.89 billion in a single year. Planning failures compound the problem, with 35% of audited authorities having no water service development plans, or failing to update them within five years. Of 57 infrastructure projects valued at R24.35 billion, 82% had significant findings, and more than half were delayed by an average of 32 months.
The Auditor-General identified three root causes: inadequate coordination across government, chronic vacancies and skills shortages, and a near-total absence of consequences for non-performance. Her conclusion was blunt – money, plans and commitments are necessary, but not sufficient. What is missing is accountability.
The Gap That Remains
For Johannesburg and Randburg residents, the Polihlali Dam and R23 billion in committed infrastructure are cold comfort when the tap runs dry today. Rand Water supplies bulk potable water to more than 11 million people across Gauteng and beyond – a vast responsibility resting on infrastructure that was never built to last indefinitely and is now showing its age acutely.
The Auditor-General has diagnosed the disease. The President has acknowledged it – and promised ring-fenced utilities, a new agency, and billions in dams. What neither has yet delivered is the cure: a local government system capable of maintaining what it has, spending what it should, and being held to account when it does not. Until that changes, the residents of Johannesburg and Randburg will keep stocking emergency water, queuing at tankers, and bracing for the next outage.
Sources: Auditor-General of South Africa, “Source to Supply: A Shared Responsibility for a Water-Resilient Future” (December 2025); President Cyril Ramaphosa, State of the Nation Address, 12 February 2026; Joburg Water, Rand Water, EWN, Daily Maverick, The Citizen, IOL (2025–2026).