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EFF protests on 3 March 2025 over the water crisis in Johannesburg. Image: EFF/ X
The EFF demonstrated outside the Johannesburg Water offices on Monday, demanding immediate action to address the ongoing water crisis affecting numerous areas across the city.
The party’s representatives delivered a memorandum of demands to Johannesburg Water executives, seeking immediate remedies to the water supply problems and addressing infrastructure concerns, including sewage maintenance and flooding issues.
Despite rainy conditions, party members gathered to march in protest of what they describe as persistent water supply interruptions affecting both affluent areas and townships throughout Johannesburg.
According to the official EFF Gauteng statement released on Saturday, “The EFF Gauteng demands an immediate end to water shedding and calls for a sustainable and reliable water supply for all residents.”
EFF Gauteng Provincial Chairperson, Nkululeko Dunga, outlined the party’s concerns to the SABC, highlighting the severity of the situation.
“We’re here because of the resolution by the central command team, which is the year of the picket lines 2025,” Dunga said.
“The picket lines dictates that we actually march against Joburg Water today, demanding for the reconnection of water supply to particularly the northern suburbs, which is your Midrand and Fourways and the CBD, which has been without water for a long time now.”
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The EFF statement emphasised the dire nature of the situation: “The water challenges in the City of Johannesburg Metropolitan Municipality have reached levels where, without urgent intervention, a humanitarian crisis is inevitable.
“This crisis is a product of systemic failures resulting from among other things, decades of neglect of the city’s infrastructure, orchestrated corruption, sheer incompetence among those operating the water utility Johannesburg Water, electricity cuts, tampering with water infrastructure, a growing population, and, to some extent, drought.”
Dunga criticised what he termed an “unconstitutional policy” being implemented by Johannesburg Water and the City of Johannesburg.
“They’re actually removing water meters and therefore creating no access to water supply within those communities and households. And that’s an unconstitutional act which is in direct violation of the human rights,” he stated.
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The provincial chairperson called for a comprehensive plan to ensure adequate water reserves, emphasising that the city allocates significant resources toward infrastructure development.
“The City of Johannesburg budgets about 33 percent of its entire budget towards the allocation of ensuring that there’s infrastructure development and maintenance,” Dunga explained.
The EFF pointed to corruption as a major factor in the crisis.
“As the water crisis deepens, politically connected water tanker mafias continue to exploit the suffering of the people, raking in millions through outrageously inflated costs and a deeply corrupt tender system.
“In 2024 alone, the City of Joburg spent over R263 million hiring 70 water tankers from two private companies. The cancer of the tender system has metastasised into the compromise of the basic human right to life, which is water,” the statement read.
The party’s statement detailed specific infrastructure failures, highlighting the Eikenhof and Zwartkoppies water interruptions.
“To demonstrate how deeply compromised the water infrastructure in Johannesburg is: in November 2024, the Eikenhof Pump Station suffered multiple disruptions, leading to a week of water outages.
“In December, the Zwartkoppies pump station required planned and unplanned maintenance, taking over a week to restore functionality. Then, in February this year, power failures at the Eikenhof and Emfuleni plants subjected over 60% of the city’s population to water outages for almost the whole month.”
EFF spokesperson Sinawo Tambo emphasised the widespread nature of the problem.
“There’s been intermittent blockages and outages of water, water shedding all over Johannesburg. Whether you’re going to Sandton, whether you’re going to Soweto, whether you’re going to Alexandra, whether you’re going to Orange Farm, our people can go days, sometimes weeks, without water,” he said.
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In its statement, the EFF emphasised that the city’s water issues are a human rights violation.
“The water outages in Joburg have now reached intolerable levels across, and in response, the EFF is taking it to the streets to demand an end to this violation of the basic right to access to quality and drinkable water.”
Tambo clarified that the issue wasn’t water scarcity but rather management failures.
“There is water. The challenge is not water. The challenge is the leadership in Johannesburg in particular.”
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