Last week, the city saw residents from water-deprived suburbs, including Melville, Westdene, Parktown West, and Emmarentia, take to the streets.
As the next step to hold the government accountable, on February 18 the People’s Water Forum, made up of WaterCAN, Joburg Crisis Alliance, JoburgCAN and others, held a media briefing at Constitution Hill to address the deepening water crisis.
Read more: Joburg water crisis deepens as Parktown West residents take to the streets
The briefing follows a letter submitted to President Cyril Ramaphosa on February 10, calling for urgent national action, including declaring the crisis a national disaster, appointing an independent intervention team, and providing emergency funding to stabilise the system.
Speaking in the Human Rights room, WaterCAN’s executive director Dr Ferrial Adam explained that the civil society group sounded the alarm about the country’s water crisis in 2023.
“Most of the municipalities across the countries are failing to provide water and sanitation to people. When you have 70% of your waste water treatment works spewing sewage in rivers and streams, that is a disaster. When half of our water drinking systems are not fit for drinking, that is a disaster.
There is no consequence management. We cannot continue with municipalities messing up with water and sanitation, and if it means categorising it as a national disaster for it to be given attention, then so be it.”
Parktown West’s representative Cheryl Stevens highlighted that the last water outage affected the suburb for 25 days. “Today, we are here to lend our support to civil societies and organisations who advocate for urgent solutions to ongoing water shortages across the whole of Johannesburg.
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While our community, and many other communities, has shown resilience and co-operation and responsible water management during repeated disruptions, resilience must not be mistaken for acceptance.” Joburg Crisis Alliance’s co-ordinator Yunus Chamda explained that a commission was necessary to unpack the cause of the city’s persistent water issues.
“As we have come to realise with many commissions of inquiry, they pull away the layers of matter to get to the truth. What a commission would do with the water crisis, is drill deep and beyond the surface to help us understand how we got to this point.”
Chamda added that there were particular questions that an inquiry would delve into, such as why there has been under expenditure, does it reveal systemic flaws, are there budgeting problems, and have we been able to get value for money?
The People’s Forum welcomed the president’s acknowledgement of the water crisis during his State of the Nation address, but reiterate that the water crisis received long overdue national attention because of sustained civil society action.
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