Water crisis deepens as SA faces prolonged outages

FRUSTRATION and unrest continue to ripple across South Africa as numerous communities grapple with ongoing water outages that have severely disrupted day-to-day activities.

- ANITA NKONKI

Municipalities attribute these outages to a combination of factors, including unplanned maintenance, burst pipes, and crucial infrastructure upgrades.

However, for many affected residents, these explanations provide little comfort when faced with empty taps. In the face of these challenges, many citizens say they find themselves in a helpless situation, forced to buy expensive bottled water or wait for government tankers, which sometimes fail to deliver much-need water.

The crisis is not isolated to a singular locality but stretches across provinces, notably Gauteng, Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and the Western Cape, where strict water usage regulations have been imposed to manage the scarcity.

In Cosmo City, a suburb in Johannesburg, the situation is particularly dire where residents report prolonged outages that exceed scheduled maintenance days, leaving them exasperated and without a reliable source of water.

Phakama Mhlali, a local nonprofit organisation dedicated to addressing service delivery issues, revealed the dire concerns the residents of Cosmo City face in a letter shared with the Saturday Star with many revealing that they are struggling with mounting municipal bills and inadequate support during these challenging times.