The Democratic Alliance (DA) believes Johannesburg Water is increasingly using water outages and upcoming Rand Water maintenance, to justify “emergency” water tanker procurement.
English soundbite by Belinda Kayser-Echeozonjoku
This creates the perfect environment for politically connected service providers to benefit while residents are left without water. For years, the City failed to maintain pipelines, reservoirs and pump stations, choosing instead to rely on expensive tanker contracts rather than fixing infrastructure.
Now Johannesburg Water has confirmed that even tanker services are collapsing because contractors have not been paid.
Residents are once again paying the price for coalition instability, financial mismanagement and governance failure in the City of Johannesburg.
The DA is calling for a full audit into:
- All water tanker contracts;
- The number of JoJo tanks owned or leased by the City;
- All emergency procurement linked to water outages;
- Total spending on tanker services; and
- Consequence Management for governance and financial failures.
Serious questions must be asked about whether emergency procurement is being used to channel work to preferred contractors during water crises.
At the same time, oversight is being undermined, with the EISD Committee repeatedly cancelled while Johannesburg’s water crisis worsens.
Residents deserve functioning infrastructure, not a permanent tanker economy built on crisis after crisis.