JOHANNESBURG, GAUTENG — The Johannesburg water crisis has reached a breaking point, with the city recording an average of nearly 140 water pipe leaks per day between June 2025 and June 2026. Prolonged water outages have become the norm across many parts of the city, leaving families dependent on tankers while billions in infrastructure funding appears to have vanished, a leading governance expert has warned.
Professor Alex van den Heever, a governance expert at the Wits School of Governance, told media that the situation points to a deep-seated governance failure spanning Johannesburg Water, City Power, and the Johannesburg Roads Agency.
R650 Million on Tankers — But No Verified Figures
The City of Johannesburg has spent approximately R650 million on water tankers over just more than five years. However, Prof. Van den Heever cautioned that even this figure is unconfirmed, noting there has been no follow-up or solid accounting of exactly how much has been spent.
“The city has gone backwards in terms of maintaining and investing in infrastructure,” Prof. Van den Heever said, adding that the pattern suggests “a severe problem potentially related to corruption in the procurement systems within the City of Johannesburg.”
R185 Billion to R220 Billion Capital Expenditure Backlog
According to Prof. Van den Heever, the city’s various entities carry an accumulated capital expenditure backlog of between R185 billion and R220 billion — money that was budgeted for maintenance over roughly 15 years but never reached the ground.
He drew a sharp contrast with the Western Cape, which, he noted, carries no such backlog. “All of their capital expenditure is actually going forward; it’s investment expenditure. But in the City of Johannesburg, nothing seems to hit the ground,” he said.
45% of Water Lost Before It Reaches Homes
Prof. Van den Heever revealed that approximately 45% of the water Johannesburg Water purchases from Rand Water is lost before reaching households. He stressed that Johannesburg does not face a water shortage — the problem lies entirely in the distribution and reticulation system.
“Johannesburg has enough water. It’s purely the distribution system, the reticulation to households, that is a problem,” he said. “Somebody doesn’t benefit from that water getting from the bulk water supply to the households. If somebody can become an intermediary and make money out of it, it appears that has become the scam.”
A Post-2020 Collapse and the Rise of the Tanker Economy
Prof. Van den Heever pointed out that prior to 2020, the widespread reliance on water tankers was virtually nonexistent. What followed, he said, has been a rapid and systematic collapse — a pattern he described as consistent with what has been observed in other metros and municipalities across the country. Johannesburg, he noted, became “a more recent victim of this pattern” in the last five to six years.
He warned that the collapse of the water system effectively creates a new business area funded by the city or by residents privately, raising the possibility that some parties have “a vested interest in destroying the infrastructure, not in maintaining it.”
“Tanker Mafia” Operates Without Consequence
Despite widespread references to a so-called water tanker mafia, Prof. Van den Heever noted that no arrests or investigations have been made public. When journalists approach Johannesburg Water for information on who is involved in tanker contracts, they are met with what he described as evasions and demands to file formal information requests.
PAIA Used as a Shield, Not a Transparency Tool
Prof. Van den Heever was sharply critical of the city’s reliance on the Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) process to handle procurement queries. He argued that the benchmark for municipalities should be transparency by default, with all procurement information — barring limited confidential details during active processes — available immediately.
“The moment somebody says, ‘Fill out a PAIA application and fight for it over three years,’ it means they’ve got something to hide,” he said. “PAIA is not providing transparency at the moment. It is providing a mechanism to delay transparency.”
Sweeping Accounts Strip Johannesburg Water of Autonomy
The governance expert also highlighted the practice of “sweeping accounts,” which he said is stripping Johannesburg Water of its financial autonomy. Despite being established as a ring-fenced public entity, the utility does not control its own finances, raising questions about the very purpose of its existence.
Prof. Van den Heever questioned why a separate entity structure was created — including a CEO package reportedly worth R5 million and a board — when the function could be run within the city itself. The sweeping of funds, he explained, means finances are treated as city-wide rather than within the entity, undermining the utility’s ability to repair burst pipes and pay contractors.
“The Silence Is an Indication of Just How High the Corruption Goes”
Prof. Van den Heever said the absence of prosecutions, combined with massive and persistent irregular expenditure, suggests widespread complicity.
“The silence is an indication of just how high the corruption goes potentially,” he stated. “These syndicates and networks are clearly operating all the way through, and nobody has an incentive to enforce the Municipal Finance Management Act at the most basic level or to lay charges against people who are known and identified as problematic.”
He concluded that the procurement systems are “so full of holes, so easy to capture” that the current consequences — failed infrastructure, collapsing services, and mounting backlogs — were, in his assessment, inevitable without urgent structural reform.
The City of Johannesburg and Johannesburg Water were not available for comment at the time of publication.