Mayfair residents protested on Saturday, demanding water after a week-long outage. Photos: Seth Thorne
Mayfair West resident Ayesha Kajee has not had tap water for a week. This has become common over the past six years in Johannesburg’s high-lying areas, and when there is water, supply is throttled at night.
Kajee said she has experienced first-hand how the lack of water diminishes people’s dignity. For the past ten years she has taken care of her elderly mother.
“Towards the end of her life, my mother was bed-ridden. You can imagine how difficult it is to care for somebody who is bed-ridden without water.”
“My mother had an autoimmune disease and picked up regular infections because of a lack of water,” she said.
On Saturday, Kajee joined several dozen Johannesburg residents protesting outside Brixton police station. All the protesters live in homes supplied by the Commando system, which includes the Crosby, Brixton and Hursthill 1 and 2 reservoirs and the Brixton Towers. It supplies neighbourhoods in central and western Johannesburg, including Brixton, Mayfair, Crosby, Langlaagte, Riverlea, Bosmont, Auckland Park, Melville, Westdene, Sophiatown and Westbury.
GroundUp has reported on problems with the system for years.
Protest organiser and Crosby resident Zahida Osman said her community is “fed up”. They have had years of nightly cuts and, more recently, a week of dry taps.
Residents say they get little communication from Johannesburg Water beyond generic warnings that “water levels are low”.
Emergency relief is equally frustrating. Water tankers are rare, and when they do arrive, drivers and Johannesburg Water fail to alert residents.
“Canary in the mine”
Ingrid Bester of the Johannesburg Water Crisis Committee described the Commando system as the “canary in the mine” for the city’s water infrastructure.
Bester said that because of the area’s higher elevation, residents feel the impact immediately from “any disruption from Rand Water, Johannesburg Water or electricity faults”.
Local reservoirs are currently bypassed because they are cracked and leaking. Added storage capacity through the new Brixton tower has not resolved supply problems.
Water expert Richard Holden said Johannesburg was built directly on top of a continental divide, making supply geographically difficult.
Because gravity alone cannot supply higher-lying areas such as Brixton, Crosby and Mayfair, water must be moved through a chain of pumping stages.
The network starts at the Vaal River treatment works and passes through the Eikenhof secondary pump station and Meredale command reservoir before reaching Commando Road.
From Commando Road, water is pumped into Crosby Reservoir, then on to the Hursthill system and Brixton Reservoir, and finally up into the Brixton Towers.
But this layout is inherently fragile because “you need all the pump stations working”, said Holden.
Systemic power and equipment outages at any point lead to rapid failure because storage reservoirs are rarely kept at full capacity. Severe infrastructure decay makes this worse.
Reservoirs are designed to act as balancing buffers, receiving a steady inflow over 24 hours while supplying heavy household demand during eight-hour peak windows. But when reservoirs leak badly, they are taken offline and bypassed.
“At Hursthill, for example, they could only fill one of the reservoirs half full because it was leaking like a sieve,” said Holden.
When storage is not balanced, the narrower bulk supply pipe has to meet peak demand directly. This drops the water pressure and makes pipelines operate like “open channels”. Elevated areas in the metro are the ones that suffer, said Holden.
Johannesburg Water had not responded at the time of publication.
In a 25 October systems update, it reported that despite slight overnight improvements in bulk inflow, the Commando system remains severely constrained.
Residents supplied by the Commando System have to endure frequent outages and low water pressure.
Decades of neglect
Bester defended Johannesburg Water staff, saying “there are very qualified people” at the utility.
But she said the entity has been starved by the City “sweeping the money away from Joburg Water”.
Revenue collected from residents by the City for water usage has not been consistently transferred to Johannesburg Water.
The City is also not collecting the water it should, due to leaks and problems with the billing system. In the 2025 financial year, Johannesburg reported to the Auditor-General (AG) that it had lost more than 207-billion litres of water. This amounted to about R2.5-billion annually in lost revenue that could have gone towards fixing and upgrading the network.
The AG warned that actual losses could be higher because of “unreliable system-generated information”. It noted that the metro spent just 0.3% of its asset value on repairs and maintenance, far below National Treasury’s recommended minimum of 8%.
Ferial Adam, director of WaterCAN, criticised the authorities for “not progressing fast enough” and for blaming high consumer demand while largely “ignoring” widespread leaks.
Holden described the current crisis as a “perfect storm”.
“You’ve got leaking pipes, leaking reservoirs, people not paying for water so they don’t care about their consumption, and people who are paying for water who don’t fix leaks on their property and fill their pools … each bit adds up,” he said.
Physical restrictions and mandatory water-demand management devices are essential, he said.
Although the Commando network often dominates headlines, Holden said water supply failures and infrastructure decay are a citywide problem.
“The whole system is under strain,” he said, pointing to widespread disruptions from Yeoville, Illovo and Alexandra to Sandton and Midrand.
He said pipe decay affects every corner of the city, from century-old steel pipes in central Johannesburg to asbestos cement networks in Sandton and Randburg that have “reached their end of life a lot earlier than the steel pipes”.
Bester said temporary fixes cannot resolve the systemic breakdown. She called for “extensive pipe replacement throughout the city from Sandton to Parktown to Kensington to Mayfair to Crosby”.
On 23 October, Rand Water, Johannesburg’s bulk water supplier, issued a notice that it is restricting supply to municipalities exceeding their allocated consumption, including Johannesburg, to protect the bulk system. As a result, these municipalities may experience low water pressure or intermittent supply outages.