Although Johannesburg is often called the City of Gold, the residents of South Africa’s largest city aren’t feeling very fortunate amid a significant water shortage. The dearth has left many residents without water for several weeks and some throughout the city have begun to speak out about Johannesburg’s ailing infrastructure.
The problem is due to factors that have plagued South Africa – and more specifically Johannesburg – for years. These include “municipal neglect, corruption and well-documented mismanagement”, said NPR. The confluence has led to hardships in getting clean water to the 6.6 million people in the Johannesburg metropolitan area.
While Johannesburg has long had trouble maintaining its water system, the past couple of years have seen a “tremendous infrastructure collapse” that has “shifted from a maintenance backlog to full-scale system failure”, said South African business website BusinessTech. The issue has become so pervasive that it “might eventually be cheaper and easier to start from scratch, building another city, than to rescue the current one”, William Gumede, a public policy professor at Johannesburg’s Wits University, told BusinessTech.
Meanwhile, water taps “remain dry across large parts of Johannesburg”, said local newspaper the Daily Maverick. Community leaders have pressed for additional changes, but there has been a “long history of commitments without delivery, and a proliferation of task teams has not inspired confidence”, said a spokesperson for South Africa’s People’s Water Forum. There must be “concrete action that reaches every community, especially the most marginalised”.
“Hundreds of thousands of people” on the city’s margins live in “informal settlements” despite Johannesburg’s wealth, said NPR. While the city is scrambling to get water to people who previously had it, there are others who “have never had running water at all”. | 
