Water trucks and solar will be the new normal in Joburg unless we invest

3 June 2021

I don't like to be dramatic or negative but the advice that I give my residents now is to get used to water trucks and look at installing solar if they are going to survive the current power and water crisis.

While City Power blames Eskom and Joburg Water blames Rand Water, the reality is that we have a R200 billion backlog in infrastructure maintenance and upgrades. We all see the crumbling roads, but what we feel on a regular basis are the old and leaking pipes, and fragile power grid where old transformers easily catch fire.

This means that where water and power outages used to take a few hours or a day at most, residents are now facing days without water or power. But even when the lights go on or the taps flow, we all have to deal with the reality that the fix is temporary, and it's only a matter of time before these vital services are lost again. Services that we pay for, but never seem to get.

As a Councillor I've had to report and escalate the same issue seven or eight times this year alone. A day after the budget was announced where the ANC claimed that all was well and good in Johannesburg, City Power unleashed a new, horrible reality on residents: load rotation. This means that the power grid is so old and fragile that they can't even implement load-shedding properly because it will cause the grid to fail or catch fire.

Yes, Eskom and Rand Water need to address the supply issues to the City, but at the heart of the problem is our own distribution network which is failing. And the recent ANC budget is only going to throw R2.7 billion at this massive problem - a mere 1% of the total backlog. In our alternative budget the DA proposed spending R10 billion for new pipes and transformers, and an additional R6 billion to repair the ones we already have. This gets us close to the 10% minimum we need to be spending each year to effectively deal with the backlog.

In Cape Town they have been able to extend even the normal life of their infrastructure by spending consistently on repairs and maintenance. This comes from allocating money properly to qualified contractors and not losing any to corruption.

This past weekend Johannesburg residents felt the first real cold chill in the air and turned to heaters for warmth, but the aged and overloaded grid had other plans in mind. The entire city was hit by outages, many took days to fix, while others are still waiting for technicians - the same technicians that the ANC removed from the local depots without any plan in place to replace them. Depots also have near empty stores and have to wait up to eight hours in a queue just to get parts.

It's no different at Joburg Water – streets are flooding until pipes run empty as teams have little to no resources to fix the issues, while ground teams say there is no available money for hiring of excavators and purchasing of parts.

Johannesburg residents deserve a well-run, caring city that puts them first, and invests where it counts so that it can deliver quality services. Only the DA is capable of delivering such a city, and residents will have the opportunity at the elections in October to bring the real change that Johannesburg needs.

Issued by Nikki van Dyk, DA CoJ SMMC for EIS, 3 June 2021