'We feel forgotten': People battle

Residents of Claremont, in the west of the city, have little faith in what they call mayor Dada Morero's 'empty promises'

- Sheree Bega

At 5am on Tuesday, Sherisse Davids* was jolted awake by what has become an unfamiliar sound: water running through the pipes of her council flat in the Johannesburg suburb of Claremont.

The mother of three leapt out of bed, grabbed every container she could find and frantically filled them. It was the first time in more than two weeks that water had flowed from her taps.

But her relief didn’t last long. “The water came back for about five minutes and then it was dead again,” said Davids, sitting outside on the cracked concrete steps of her block with her toddler son. “We just want to open a tap, run a bath, and soak — and live like human beings again.”

She and her neighbours live in a small pocket of council flats that has not had a reliable supply of water for more than a decade. For her, Tuesday’s fleeting trickle was yet another cruel reminder of their daily struggle.

“The residents in this area have endured 12 years without water, so we've adopted to a bucket system,” said Claudette Abrahams, who lives on the top floor of Davids’ block. “The water comes on at like lam, 2am, for an hour... For the last two weeks, it’s been dry land and dry taps.”

Drained and exhausted, Abrahams’ words carried the heaviness of someone who had been fighting this protracted battle for far too long. “We are tired. Twelve years is a long time. We don’t even know if our geyser works anymore.”

While wealthier suburbs install boreholes (many of them without authorisation) or buy bottled water amid Johannesburg's ongoing water crisis, families here live by the water tanker’s schedule — or wake up every hour hoping for a brief surge of low-pressure water. For more than two weeks, the taps have been bone-dry. Daily life has become a punishing ritual: queuing, fetching, carrying and rationing.